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CONNECTING TO THE INTERNET SHOULDN’T BE ONE OF THEM.

Creating an Internet presence can
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56 K REALITV

IS THERE A 5£

x 2 TECHNOLOGY

XTRA

Independent surveys show users
would rather switch than wait

Results from Millwood Brown International, an Independent Marketing Research Firm

In a recent random telephone survey of
over 500 online households, 62% of the
respondents who indicated that they are
“Definitely” or “Probably” planning to
purchase a 56 Kbps* modem within the
next six months claimed that they would
be likely to switch to another Internet
Provider if their current ISP does not
have 56 Kbps* technology.

These results add up to an obvious
conclusion: users want 56 Kbps* down¬
loads now. And U.S. Robotics is shipping
x2™ Technology now. Since U.S. Robotics
has the leading worldwide modem market-
share, it would probably be wise for you
to invest in your business by investing
in x2 - NOW.

Survey indicates unparalleled ISP support for x2 Technology

The results of Boardwatch’s ISP Survey are in! Over 3,600 ISPs were
surveyed. Following are some survey highlights:

ISPs offering 56 Kbps* service plan to use U.S. Robotics technology
more than any other

The 56 Kbps* technology ISPs will be using:

U.S. Robotics x2 Technology.76.99%

Rockwell K56PIUS.20.8%

Lucent V.FIex2.;.5.31%

Will support ALL.1.99%

45 2 ISPs responded to this survey

ISPs use U.S. Robotics modems more than any other

The modem equipment ISPs use:

U.b. KODOtICS.61.81%

Microcom...17.40%

Haves. ic

Multitech.

.12.55%

Motorola.

.12.21%

Supra/Diamond.

.9-95%

Cardinal.

.8.14%

Practical Peripherals.

.7.16%

Computone.

.2.16%

ZyXEL.

...1.96%

Telebit.1.86%

2040 ISPs responded to this survey

The x2 Xtreme
Advantage Program:

THE TIME
IS NOW

x2 is shipping, so don't be

left behind. ISPs worldwide are
taking part in x2 Xtreme
Advantage, a special program
exclusively for ISPs. x2 Xtreme
Advantage offers ISPs the
opportunity to reach the millions
of Courier,™ Sportster,® and
Megahertz® modem users
accessing the Internet with
x2/56 Kbps* downloads.

The best competitive advantages
for ISPs, including:

• access to millions of subscribers
who use U.S. Robotics modems

• enhanced visibility through

U.S. Robotics marketing programs

• inclusion in the U.S. Robotics
Connections CD that ships with
every Sportster and Courier
modem

• opportunities to capitalize on the
heavily-marketed x2 Technology

• listing of your service on the
U.S. Robotics worldwide web
site - reach millions of
people who are interested in
getting downloads on the
Internet at up to 56 Kbps*

Become eligible for the x2 Xtreme
Advantage program by using

U. S. Robotics x2 remote access
and/or modem pool products at
your POP locations. Then simply
fill out the registration form that's
available at www.usr.com/x2, or
by calling 1.800.877.7533, ext. 6739.

Request your free copy of
x2: THE GAME on CD ROM.

You could win a free x2 Courier™

V. Everything modem.

www.usr.com/x2

Mobotics

TECHNOLOGY

Itflobotics

ISSN: 1054-2760
Volume XI, Issue 4
APRIL 1997

I h / • 4 i

Guide to Internet Access and the World Wide Web

FABLE OF CONTENTS

APRIL 1997

Forrest Stroud —

CONSUMMATE WINSOCK APPS

Who Is This Stroud Guy Anyway? ....

Alan Cox —

LINUX REDUX

Providing Dial-up Services With Linux .

I Steve Stroh —

WIRELESS DATA DEVELOPMENT

Technologies to Provide Internet Access .

Paul Stapleton —

ISPS MARKET REPORT

Assessing the Value of ISPs.58

Scott Swedorski —

TUCOWS

Online Games.56

Wallace Wang —

NOTES FROM THE UNDERGROUND

Hate Groups On The Internet.76

BIG BOARD BRIEFS

America Online Offers Refunds.88

Doug Shaker —

JAVA JITTERS

A Little More Working Code and

Some Arcana Explained.78

Rea Andrew Redd —

EDUCATION LINK

Your Next Career in Education.82

Ric Manning —

MANNING THE WIRES

The Web Is Fertile Ground For
Do-It-Yourself Stock Brokers.86

Frank Sowa —

CYBERWORLD MONITOR

Independence In Cyberspace Will Be
Undermined In 1997 By Access Fees. 90

Durant Imboden —

PUTTING THE NET TO WORK

Cyberbooze.9 4

Jack Rickard

LEGAL

Convergence or Collision:

Telecommunications Regulation and the Internet

Reed Hundt, Chairman, Federal Communications Commission.72

ALSO

System Operator Liability: What Have We Learned? —

Eric Schlacter, Esq.66

The MovinCool Keeps Your Equipment From Getting Too Hot - Steve Clark.64

CubaWeb — The Cuban Government’s Official Web Site -

by Vito Echevarria.96

TELEBITS.32

Zoom Introduces A Multi-Purpose ISDN Product

DeltaComm Launches National Toll-Free ISP

Access Beyond Introduces RA Servers At $499 Per Port

Visual Web Tools CD-ROM

Chat With Eliza...The Original Chatterbot!

USR LAN Linker Is A High-Performance Low-Cost Router
Web Site Dedicated To ISP Financing
Cisco AS5200 To Include Free 56K Upgrade
CompuServe To Test All 56K Modem Technologies
New Online Gaming Network Hits The Web
Prodigy Orders x2 Modems For Its Pops
IcVerify Releases Debit Authorization Package For Windows
Real Time Agribuisiness Reports Via The Web
Fantasy Baseball Online
Web Browsing For The Blind
The Complete $1,200 Web Server
After Dark For The Wall Street Journal
Prodigy Licenses Voxware Technology
Bell Atlantic Offers Aggresive ISDN Package
InterestlAlert Announces Push Technology

LISTS OF THINGS

WebWatch Ads.98

Advertisers List.100

Kevin & Kell - Bill Holbrook

Page 62

Editor-At-Fault

Steve Clark

Copy Editor

Bill McCarthy

Cont ributing Writers

Alan Cox
Chris Babb
John C. Dvorak
Vito Echevarria
Avi Freedman
Bill Holbrook
Reed Hundt
Durant Imboden
Ric Manning
Rea Redd

Eric Schlacter
Doug Shaker
Frank Sowa
Paul Stapleton
Steve Stroh
Forrest Stroud
Scott Swedorski
Jim Thompson
Wallace Wang

Production Manager

Jack Kramer

Graphic Design and Production

Marla Asheim
Kathy Meyers
Rick Gaither

Su bscriptions/Circulation

Cathy Rougier
Deanna Glenn

Technical Operations

Gary Funk

Advertising Director

Brian Noto

David Dixon

Gentle Reminder

Tom Her

Advertising Sales

Donny Yoshida
Bob Holley

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Littleton, CO 80123
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EDITOR’S NOTES

by Jack Rickard

A BIRD IN THE HEDGE...

T he 56 Kbps battle has taken
some interesting turns—in
all ways toward ever murkier
waters.

US Robotics began shipping x2 modems on February 24th. On the
retail side, it’s pretty impressive. We’ve eschewed most of the
reports and just gone shopping instead. Visiting about a dozen
CompUSA, Circuit City, OfficeMax, and similar stores in the
Denver and San Francisco areas, the US Robotics presence has
been pretty impressive. Typically 12 feet of modem space with
about nine feet devoted to an almost Roman square of USR prod¬
ucts, with about 3 feet of jumbled pile labeled “other modems.” US
Robotics is simply overpowering on the point of sale display front
in any event, and they are currently the only ones selling prod¬
ucts. Are they selling? It’s a little early to tell. But getting chat¬
ty with the ever knowledgeable geniuses on the store floor indi¬
cates that they believe so.

On the ISP front US Robotics continues to announce ISPs that are
supporting x2. This is almost unfair. If you use US Robotics
remote access servers, it just isn’t very hard to support. Install the
software and make the claim. That’s about it. But they have some
of the larger ones like Prodigy, AOL, and Netcom, and the smaller
ISPs are under some pressure to respond as well.

Rockwell has gone a different direction. They’ve really been the
power behind a really rather amazing "consortium” of something
called K56flex. Virtually EVERYONE besides US Robotics and
Cardinal has jumped on board this, and we’ve never seen so much
joining and backslapping and carrying on over an agreement to
gang up on US Robotics. But we don’t quite understand the agree¬
ment, and it is rapidly becoming evident that nobody joining the
agreement does either.

There have been so many new people come into the industry, that
terms don’t mean what they used to. The basis of the
Rockwell/Lucent/Motorola/andeverybodyelse consortium is
referred to as an INTEROPERABILITY agreement. To me, this
implies a lower level of symmetry than, say, a COMPATIBILITY
agreement. When things are compatible, they are generally con¬
sidered, feature for feature, the same. The actual implementa¬
tions might vary, but anything one can do, the other can do as well,
and interactively with the first. They are interchangeable. When
two modems are INTEROPERABLE, this generally implies a
lower level of coupling—they can connect at some given speeds for
some given purposes and interoperate. Each of them might do
more, but at some basic given subset of features, they can connect.

Rockwell had a technology titled K56Plus. Lucent Technologies
had a technology titled V.Flex2. We were well aware that they all
agreed to INTEROPERATE, and a new pseudo-standard was bom
thereby K56flex. Now we have it from Rockwell that there is no
K56Plus, there is only K56flex and that EVERYONE will do
K56flex and that everyone’s features in the consortium will be
shared as part of the K56flex consortium and simultaneously.

Further, that V.flex2 will disappear on the Lucent end and their
technology will also not only interoperate at the K56flex level, but
in fact it will BE K56flex and only K56flex.

We have a little problem with the concept here. Multitech and
Livingston have been mouthing concepts that would imply that
Lucent Technologies chipset has some superior features. Most
notably, Lucent may have a hush-hush algorithm loosely referred
to as “level learning” that can get around the FCC Part 68 signal
level power restrictions in the bundle and actually DO the full 56
Kbps without exceeding the signal level restrictions. This would
be no mean feat. Further, the Lucent chipset purports to support
a PCM upstream technology that allows higher speeds on the
upstream channel from the subscriber to the Internet—some 40
Kbps instead of 33.6 Kbps. That would be significant. And option¬
ally, the Lucent set would do a symmetrical 45 Kbps both ways—
perhaps an advantage in some applications.

Rockwell is shipping chips that do not have those features. And
they are chips that are NOT software upgradeable. And they
insist there are NO feature differences between the Rockwell
chipset K56flex and the Lucent K56flex. Everyone at Rockwell
and Lucent are striving manfully to insist in forceful terms that
they agree that they did agree. And they still agree. In response
to pointed questions about what they have agreed to, and what is
to be done about very specific features that modem users might be
interested in, everyone becomes ponderously interested in then-
shoes and shirt sleeves and necktie adjustments. And obdurately,
they insist they have an agreement. And EVERYBODY is part of
the agreement except US Robotics. It’s been agreed you see.

3COM, for example, is part of the agreement. But they have just
announced ANOTHER agreement. This agreement is to purchase
US Robotics for about 6.6 frigging billion dollars. Immediately on
announcement, a number of the smaller and more sidelined play¬
ers in the modem and remote access markets, began giggling hys¬
terically in relief and chanting that “x2 is dead, you’ve melted her,
hail 3COM Dorothy, the witch is dead.” Yes, we had two vendors
actually giggle into the phone when describing how x2 now had to
die because 3COM had already joined the K56flex consortium.

But unfortunately, Dorothy neglected to ask for the broom.
Actually, it was pathetic. In the world of priorities, you have inter¬
operability agreements, and you have $6.6 billion mergers. Those
who can’t figure this one out probably DO deserve to have their
office furniture sold at auction. At best, 3COM has hedged then-
bets on both sides more securely than anyone possibly could. But
it doesn’t seriously look like the best is what will happen. The
company appears gleeful at having acquired US Robotics and x2,
and it is hopelessly naive that they will now spike the x2 advan¬
tage just when they’ve got the bow off the box and are groping for
the batteries. In any event, they get to play it anyway they want
it. A super hedge...

Hayes Microcomputer Products is part of the consortium too.
They’ve been a big purchaser of Rockwell chips in the past, but

8 Boardwatch - April 1997

they’ve been leaning toward Lucent in this round. Hayes has
some experience neither Rockwell nor Lucent has had. Hayes has
been beaten by US Robotics so many times in the past that I think
they’ve started to actually crave the taste of their own blood in
their mouths. This is a battle that predates HST, predates
Boardwatch, predates most of the industry. Hayes has survived
divorce, bankruptcy, HST, and a dozen other things. But certainly
they have been battling bitterly with US Robotics since 1984 that
I know about. You don’t want to ever count these guys out, and
they just keep coming back for more, quarter after quarter. I’ve
grown to kind of admire them over the years just for the pugna¬
cious tenacity of it. A kind of terminator mentality. They just keep
coming, even when they should be dead. You can’t kill these guys.
The closest to come to achieving it was Dennis Hayes himself, and
I understand he’s actually given up trying to kill it and bought
himself a new CEO to let him try his hand. Dennis is now chair¬
man and doing deals. We love you big guy. Don’t ever change.

Hayes has announced an upgrade plan where you can turn in
ANY old modem of any speed, along with $99 ducats and get a
shiny new 56 Kbps model. This has actually proven quite popular
even before the event of their having a modem to ship. They have
announced a March 24th ship date, a month precisely after US
Robotics, and it rather looks like they might ship some. But as I
said, these guys have scar tissue on top of their old scars. So they
have found a way to get x2 technology from Texas Instruments,
who makes the DSP chips for US Robotics. Under some sort of
wacky back licensing deal, TI can offer x2 to Hayes. And Hayes is
actually going to make some x2 modems under their Practical
Peripherals subsidiary.

That would qualify as a hedge, but never mind that. They
announced on March 13th that they are also going to buy 100% of
Cardinal—at an undisclosed price. Cardinal is an interesting
case. They started a few years ago making very cheap bargain
basement modems that, unlike Zooms, more or less worked. In
recent years, they’ve gotten to where they actually work pretty
well, and they’ve stayed reasonably priced. The company has
gained a little bit more market share each and every quarter to
the point where they produce almost as many modems as Hayes—
maybe 10% market share. And they’re pretty good modems. But
most recently, they were the ONLY modem manufacturer to throw
in with US Robotics to license the x2 technology up front. So now
Hayes, firmly in the Lucent K56flex camp that we think is K56flex
only perhaps more so, now has TWO subsidiaries, Practical
Peripherals and Cardinal, making x2 modems? A brazen hedge...

Cisco has made a pretty aggressive move into remote access
servers with their AS5200 line. The company is so big they are
having difficulties maintaining their growth curve. They have
6,000 products now and anything related that looks interesting
they just buy. They are taking on Microsoft-like characteristics
and probably for the same reasons. Doubling sales each year
starts to get hard at about the 5 billion dollar level without
absorbing every shiny thing in sight. But they have been strange¬
ly vague about when they are going to deliver K56flex upgrades—
though the upgrades will be free. More or less this summer.
Ostensibly, this is because they want a fully tested product before
they ship anything. That is persuasively Cisco-like and laudable
up to a point. They have the Mercedes-Benz position in most of
the ISP equipment rooms, and it might be worth a few months just
to avoid obvious boo-boos caused by installing chipsets that were,
ahem..aggressively fielded. On the other hand, it might be a kind
of gentle hedge...

I’ll be right up front that I don’t know what all this means. The
ISPs have not declared one way or another persuasively, they’re
just sizing things up. US Robotics looks dominant on the shelf, but
they were pretty dominant there before 56K came up, and within
a week or so the other modems should start showing up on the
shelves too. I do know the 3COM deal didn’t kill x2, and Hayes is

a respected player with many seasons of
modem fashions under their belts, who seem
peculiarly averse to declaring for anybody
yet either. They want to make fast
modems, and I’m under the impression
they’ll make one out of a weedwhacker rfNT
if you’ll show them how to first start
the little gasoline engine and then how
to modulate it. That buzzing noise can -sp i i
always be declared a feature.

But it does seem that the 56K waters, ^
rather than clarifying as I would hope, ^
seem to be growing murkier. These merg¬
ers and acquisitions are profoundly inter¬
esting, and a bit confusing. I think Lucent
probably has the best technology at this point,
and that does not historically bode well for it being the one that
wins. US Robotics has the best marketing machine top to bottom,
and now 3COM, who really did need a dance partner at this end
of the industry, in bed with them. Rockwell would just still like to
be in the chip business when this is over, and it is probably worth
noting that our current luxury of $200 fast modems instead of
$1,200 fast modems has largely been the work of their hands.
Motorola and Lucent both seem quite willing to sue US Robotics if
x2 appears to win the battle. Consumers are likely to be both con¬
fused and ecstatic, and ISPs are likely to be mostly confused—for
most of the rest of the year.

Once upon a time, a little bird flew north for the winter. There’s
a problem here, and the erstwhile, but confused little bird start¬
ed to grow colder as he flew. Soon he was truly flying through a
confusing blizzard ice storm. Ice built up on his wings, and he
fell frozen to the ground. A cow happened by and dumped cow
stuff on the little bird, as cows are wont to do. The warm steamy
pile of manure, though smelly, melted the ice and began to thaw
the little bird. Happy just to be alive, the little bird began to
tweet joyously at his turn of fortune. Hearing the tweet, a fox
happened by, carefully scraped the manure aside, and promptly
ate the little bird.

From this we learn that traditions, such as flying SOUTH for the
winter, do have basis. Not everyone that dumps manure on you is
really your enemy. And not everyone that pulls you out of a pile
of manure is precisely your friend. And when warm and happy in
a pile of manure, it’s advisable to keep your thoughts on the topic
to yourself.

If you’re still with me after the little parable, you’re probably an
Internet service provider. We think xDSL will be a big story this
year. XDSL products require a dry copper pair from the telephone
company, usually a very modestly price service but not terribly
common in the past. They used to be used by alarm companies.
We’re trying to amass a chart of all 50 states listing the magic
words you say to a telephone company to actually get an unloaded,
unconditioned, 2-wire dry copper pair. The telcos are being very
recalcitrant about actually selling these unless you know the
magic words. A number of you have already researched this in
your areas. If you could drop me an e-mail indicating the area, the
magic word name, the tariff number if you have it, the installation
charge you were quoted, and the total monthly recurring cost for
the loop from ISP to CO and from CO to customer, we’ll pool all
this information and publish it. I’ll even go first. US West,
Colorado, it’s called an LAD line, we were quoted $261 install and
$13.28 for each loop for a total monthly recurring charge of
$26.56. This was for a total length of 19,400 feet. Send yours to
jack.rickard@boardwatch.com. Pass the word....

Jack Rickard
Editor Rotundus.

Boardwatch - April 1997 9

Letters to the Editor

Boardwatch Magazine

8500 W Bowles Ave Suite 210

Littleton Co 80123

56 KBPS MODEMS

Jack,

Just wanted to let you know that I really
enjoyed your definitive masterpiece on
56kbps modems. As so frequently hap¬
pens with your magazine I found myself
hoping the article would never end.

Also, thanks for bringing back Doug
Shaker.

As always, I wish you and your staff con¬
tinued success.

Dale Hempen
Englewood, CO

Thanks for writing Dale. I too am very
pleased Doug is back. His writing is just
very very good.

As to the article on 56 Kbps modems,
rest assured that it DIDN’T end. We
just had to cut it off at that point in
our January issue. I rather think this
story will continue to unfold through¬
out the year.

Regards;

Jack Rickard

♦ ♦♦

Hi Jack,

I really enjoyed reading your on-target
evaluation of the current “conventional
wisdom” regarding the demise of the
small scale ISP. We are of a mind on this
particular issue. There is another issue
which is being similarly artificially
hyped that I would like to see you
address. This is the current inflated dis¬
cussion of “Internet Push” and the
resulting “demise of the Web” (note the
cover of this month’s “Wired” magazine).
I believe this is a thinly veiled effort by
business interests to turn the Internet

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

Address correspondence to Letters to the Editor, Boardwatch Magazine,
8500 West Bowles Ave., Suite 210, Littleton, CO 80123; by fax to
(303)933-2939 or by e-mail to letters@boardwatch.com

into an endless stream of commercials.
Our Internet business got it’s start as a
two line BBS in Tampa (remember
Roboboard? *G*). Through the years I’ve
found Boardwatch to be THE definitive
Internet magazine, particularly for those
of us with a technological bent. Thank
you for this fine publication. As a pub¬
lished author (“Unix Security for the
Organization”, SAMS, 1994) and Internet
entrepreneur I would welcome an oppor¬
tunity to contribute to the publication,
and thereby to our online universe.

Regards,

Rich Bryant

Owner, Business Technologies

rbb@iseek.com

http://iseek.com/

Rich:

I’m seeing no shortage of commercials
now. But I confess I am a bit of a
PointCast network addict. And I think
there is room for development there. The
death of the web? I’m guessing not. But I
can see a lot of information including
news, weather, stocks, and so forth com¬
ing via similar avenues. I don’t, for
example, get on the Wall Street Journal
web site often at all, but if they had a
PointCast network version, I believe I
would have to have it, and at almost any
price. So I think these new channels have
a lot of interesting points. On the other
hand, they are terribly inefficient, and
spew an awful lot of data about the globe
that never gets quite read.

We are more or less always looking for
new columnists. A wish list:

A kick butt e-mail column. Add-ons, tips,
techniques, advances, just on the e-mail
side. We’ll call it “Stupid E-mail Tricks”

A backbone gossip column. Who’s building
what as far as new backbones. Who broke

theirs. Who’s buying who. New hardware
advances for backbone building. Who’s
finally got a new black helicopter. Call it
“Dedicated Access” or “IP — Bone Home”.
More overseas stuff. There’s a lot happen¬
ing all over the world. I can’t begin to
keep up with it. Pick your favorite conti¬
nent, and do us a monthly column on
what’s happening there.

Jack Rickard

I’m curious at your statement in the
Feb letters section that “blacklists on
the other hand, almost definitely are
illegal”. I’m under the impression that
AOL got a ruling exactly the opposite
of that in a recent court case.
Meanwhile, those who maintain a list
stating that such-and-such ISP toler¬
ates spammers ought to be safe from
libel suits given that ‘truth is an
absolute defense’, if the statement is
in fact true. And if I choose to use one
or more blacklists (even the widely
published AOL list) as a filtering
mechanism on a listserv I own, I don’t
see where a law is being broken
(though the size of my filter might
break something). I am not, after all, a
government, so I’m not violating any¬
one’s first amendment rights by reject¬
ing their mail. After all, what is a
Usenet killfile if it’s not a privately-
maintained blacklist?

Incidentally, while your other statement
concerning the legality of spam may be
true now, our own state of Colorado may
be changing the playing field. There is a
bill scheduled for legislative committee
on Monday, Feb 10 which may require
spanners to maintain and honor a don’t
contact list. It may not survive commit¬
tee, and it doesn’t have anywhere near
enough teeth for my liking (I’d like
spammers to fall under the provisions of
the Colorado ‘make my day law), but it’s
a start.

10 Boardwatch - April 1997

BTW - Great column on the ‘death’ of the
small ISP. I don’t buy Computerworld’s
projections either.

Charles Oriez
coriez@netone.com
Charles:

Sounds like an invitation to net lawyer¬
ing. I’m going to refer you to qualified
legal counsel on this one. There are no end
of legal theories that sound good online.
But my experience has been that they
stray somewhat widely from current law.

In going through just the pile for this
letters to the editor, I’m just cowered by
everything from an enormous treatise
on why I should write my congressmen
to help save the American Bison, an
update on some Israeli’s tunneling
under the Rock of the Dome and start¬
ing WWIII here soon (again it had to be
30 pages), dozens of ways to make
money, and so on to the point that it is
discouraging.

But I am only inconvenienced and haras¬
sed by spam — if at times to the point of
tears. You guys that are going to “fix it” for
me are REALLY scary. At NANOG a week
or so ago, I listened to Paul Vixie announce
a “Vixie Switch” for the Internet you would
undoubtedly just love. It can make parts of
the entire network wink out based on
Vixie’s current spamwrath, mood, or equip¬
ment room malfunction.

Jack Rickard

BOARDWATCH DIRECTORY OF ISPS

Reference is made to the above men¬
tioned article where you indicate that
ISPs connect to MCI, Sprint, UUNET,
and other backbone providers. There is
no mention of AT&T. I would think they
would be a major backbone provider.

Please respond why they were not listed.

Thanks.

Joe Perlman

Joseph_Perlman@msn.com

Joe:

They weren’t listed because they are not a
major backbone provider — despite what
you would think. They do offer dial-up
services, and have extensive contracts
with BBN Planet among others to pro¬
vide their backbone services.

Actually, I rather suspect they do have
some backbone design activity going on.
There’s an awful lot of ATM switch
equipment disappearing into that maw.
But as of yet, they have not announced
any backbone, or backbone services.

Jack Rickard

REGARDING “I PASS”

Hi Jack,

We’ve talked to them. They proposed to
sell us dial time for $1.60 an hour, and
buy it for $1.00.

Where I come from that’s a gross margin
of 60% — pretty dam good for handling
two SQL fetches and one store operation.

Needless to say, we “passed”. But we’re
working on a much cheaper, and more
rationally-priced, solution.

Stay tuned.

Karl Denninger
karl@MCS.Net

Karl:

Got me again. 1 spoke with the president
of IPASS for over an hour. I asked him
seven times about this. In each case, he
was emphatic that they do negotiate
these on a case by case basis, but in no
case does the markup exceed 15%.

He got his story. And now he’s hawking
60% all over the net. Yes, I would pass
too. And he will fail as a result.

This happens to me a lot if you can
believe it. We do a story on some small
outfit with an idea. They get about a
dozen calls in response to the story. And
they double the price now that they have
their “hit.” It is pathetic because it isn’t
the way to build a business, and they’ve
no idea how vaporish the fifteen minutes
of fame is. But we do run into them.

Jack Rickard

WINDOWS95 & DUN
— AN ISP’S VIEW

Hello, I have found your magazine very
insightful, however, I have not seen any
articles about how painful Win95’s setup
process is for connecting to ISPs for

novices. I have talked with many other
ISPs and the only way to get people online
is to send them a 5 page packet and have
them walk through it step-by-step adding
in Windows95’s TCP/IP, setting it up, then
adding the Dial-Up Networking icon for
the provider. As a provider, almost 90% of
our calls are from people who find this
task too daunting to even try.

I wonder if you could offer some help of
what us ISPs can do? I have not seen
ANY utilities out there that will auto¬
matically install this all... I have tried
playing around with INF files, with
some MicroSoft tech guys, but it even
stumps them! Did MicroSoft make this
hard on purpose? Life would be so much
easier for us if our customers did not
have to go through this painful process.
The best I’ve done is create a custom
setup disk with Delphi Developer that
installs certain programs, but does noth¬
ing to add the DUN components..

Is it even possible?

Philip J. Varner
philip@inxpress.net
Internet Expressway
Madison, WI

Philip:

Microsoft Windows95 was released
August 24, 1995. In our November 1995
issue, we published the longest tutorial
we’d ever written. It has since been
republished in our directory four consec¬
utive issues and has been the most often
requested reprint in Boardwatch histo¬
ry. I am familiar with the difficulties
new callers face.

That said, we were pretty taken with the
fact that TCP/IP was in there, and that
everything was included to allow Win-
dows95 connections to any Internet ser¬
vice provider — instead of some geeky
proprietary thing to get onto Microsoft
Network only.

In any event, I’m certain there’s some
way to install a Dial-Up Networking
component without all of that. The prob¬
lem is getting it to work on all installa¬
tions. There are a lot of variables to a
Windows95 installation. The problems
go beyond just getting a connection up. A
lot of ISPs have developed some pretty
cunning stuff. But on some machines,
because the Windows95 was a bit hosed
up anyway, the install disk causes it to
all come unraveled. Then the customer is

Boardwatch - April 1997 11

on the phone not just without a connec¬
tion, but screaming bloody murder be¬
cause their machine is now all hosed up
from the software they tried to install. It
can be a nightmare.

Jack Rickard

♦ ♦♦

DESSERT

Thanks for the generous helping of
SPAM, but I’m now interested in the
next item on the menu: Cookies. After
downloading a ZD freeware called
CookieMaster I’m now notified of
attempts to “allow cookie to be set.”
Horrified would be a better word.

The persistence of web sites ranges from
disinterest to downright demanding.
What’s the deal here? Are these notifica¬
tions a sign of unwarranted invasion of
my computer privacy or they are harm¬
less byproduct of web browsing?

Inquiries minds need to know.
jbanman@orci.com

JBANMAN

I would go more for the harmless byprod¬
uct of web browsing myself. An invasion
of computer privacy ? I would guess it
will not be perceived that way.

Cookies are mainly given to your web
browser by a web site. Subsequently, you
will cough your specific cookie on com¬
mand. Let’s describe for you how this
works to your advantage on our web site
in any event.

We put the full text of Boardwatch on a
WWW server. To my knowledge, we’re still
the only print magazine that does that
without any coy reservations, teaser table
of contents, etc. Full text, full graphics. We
DO want to know who is accessing this
data however. And we ask those seeking to
read the book in a very up-front fashion
for their name, address, e-mail, phone, etc.
Unfortunately, while we always intend to
then inundate them with direct mail street
mail exhortations to subscribe, we never
have gotten around to doing much of that.

But in the process, we give them a logon
name and password to logon to the ser¬
vice. In theory, each time they return to the
site, they would “logon” after the old fash¬
ion online service, and access the text.

Cookies gave us a rather neat out on this.
You come to our web site, cough your valu-

12 Boardwatch - April 1997

able info, and get a logon name and a
password. Then you logon and read what
you like. But a curious thing happens on
your next visit. You don’t even get the
annoying logon screen. When you logged
on the first time, we stashed a cookie in
the cookie file on your browser. Each time
we get a visitor, we ask them for their
cookie. If they cough it, they get in directly
to the web site without ever having to deal
with the logon screen at all. If they don’t,
they must be new to the site, and we run
them through the process.

The net result is that you don’t have to
logon after the first encounter. We know
from the cookie that you’ve already been
here. We already have your information
— which if you recall we solicited in a
very up-front fashion and you gave it up
willingly at the time. But the cookie
allows us to not plague you with this
silly business again. It doesn’t contain
much as I recall — maybe the last time
you were on, which we update each time.
If you don’t come back for six months you
go away entirely from our system.

And really why are they on there? I
myself don’t want to go through the
logon process twelve times a day to look
at back issues of my own magazine.
When I first encountered the cookie con¬
cept, Gary had to gen up a CGI so I did¬
n’t have to. Now you don’t have to either.

I know of no method of getting cookies to
spill anything private. They give us back
precisely what we put in there. We could
track how often you are on here I guess. If
you consider that something you should
keep private from us, then I suppose its an
issue. And I suppose we could go cookie
crazy and put a different one on every
page to track which pages you could
access. To me, this isn’t much of a big deal
because everyone always could do that
sort of tracking on bulletin boards going
back a million years. And I’m not suffi¬
ciently interested to crap up every page on
our web site with unique cookie stuff.

Bottom line is that what cookies are gen¬
erally used for is almost entirely benign
and usually decrease the annoyance level
to you the user. Like anything, I suppose
they could be intentionally designed for
abuse, but even the abuse leads to a pretty
ho-hum I yawn result for most users.

That said, most of the browsers already
have cookie alerts and flags to set so you
won’t accept a cookie.

Jack Rickard

WHOOOOOAAAAH! JACK

Jack,

Loved your Editor’s Notes this issue I
just received.

In a nutshell, you say exactly what I
believe, and stand for with almost every¬
thing I own (my ISP business). Amer¬
ican Spirit is alive and well, contrary to
popular “big money” belief.

Now, let’s see where we as ISPs stand in
the next few years, I’m with you! As long
as the telcos don’t buy us out of business
by lobbying FCC/Gov’t et al...

Best Regards,

John Shafto

JWShafto@mato.com

John@shafto.org ::: N7YA0

http://www . mato. com

Altaire Enterprises, Inc. (605) 578-1400

Well, you’ve rather hit the weak spot
John. When all else fails, telcos fall back
on legislation, the FCC, and ultimately
the courts to protect their holy right to
own the business. And at that point all
bets are off.

I’m very impressed with Reed Hundt and
the FCC crowd these days. But the
Congress and the Courts can indeed
change the landscape and it is a very
real danger I haven’t even been putting
into the equation.

Jack Rickard

CHOOSING AN ISP

Jack,

I just visited your WWW site in hopes of
gathering some info about choosing an
ISP or WWW provider. Your image map
mentions that you have this information
but I couldn’t find it. let me provide you
with some background ...

I am an MIS professor who frequently
receives calls from local small business¬
es that want a WWW presence. About
the only thing these businesses have in
common is that their proprietors know
nothing about the Internet. It comes as
quite a shock to them when they find
that there is a lot more that needs to be
done besides building a WWW page,
such as choosing their provider.

The fastest, most reliable connection available today.
So what are you waiting for?

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DIVA ISDN reduces expensive waiting time and
eliminates the need for a second analog
phone/fax line.

±L J

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. installation has never been simpler. No complicated AT
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MultiLink PPP, fax, and V.120 are preconfigured, so choos¬
ing options is as easy as choosing a print driver.

Flexible. Send/receive analog
over digital. The DIVA POTS
Option lets you connect standard
phone lines and fax machines.

Meets CAPI 2.0, the international
interface standard for ISDN cards.
Great for fax groups 3 and 4,
modems, remote control, and
custom ISDN applications.

'^WTIIODIIIDDIO

Analog over digital.

Whether you’re connecting ;
to another ISDN user or '
sending a standard fax from
your applications, commu¬
nication has never been
easier or faster.

Compatibility. DIVA
is compatible with
common ISP networks
and leading routers
such as Ascend, Bay
Networks, Cisco, Shiva,
and many others.

( Multitasking. Send a 60-page document every
second. DIVA'S multitasking capability allows
you to take full advantage of ISDN. Receive/send
data while browsing the Internet, or work simul¬
taneously through your multimedia applications.

MilliFast. Cut connection time to mere milliseconds -
considerably faster than the 1/2 minute of a modem.
Delivers throughput up to 512Kbps with compression.
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today, call 1-800-80-EICON
10-803-4266), or visit us
at www.eicon.com. What are
you waiting for?

TECHNOLOGY

Connecting People to Information . 11

I have searched all over the Internet
looking for the definitive look at the cri¬
teria used to choose a provider but have
come up empty, ideally, a business
should be handed a matrix. One axis
would be a list of all of the criteria that
go into choosing a provider. The other
axis would be the providers. Underneath
the matrix would be a list of the criteria,
defined, with suggested optimal values
for each criteria.

Unfortunately, to my knowledge, noth¬
ing even remotely this user-friendly
exists. For the most part, the discussions
about choosing a criteria are formatted
like a term paper - no business person
has time to read information in that for¬
mat. Further, their criteria, of which
there must be at least a couple dozen, are
typically glossed over and condensed into
3-4 criteria, e.g., monthly charge, amount
of disk space, speed of connection.

Surely a publication such as Board-
watch has done something along the
lines of what I am looking for (or knows
who has done it) so that I don’t have to
reinvent the wheel. Can you help?

Thanx

David J. Jankowski, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor of MIS
College of Business Administration
CSU, San Marcos
San Marcos, CA 92096-0001
(619) 750-4235

http://www. c susm. edu/publ ic / j anko
wski/doctorj.html

The problem with the Matrix David is
that the one axis listing the providers
would now have 3640 entries. We’ve done
the best we could with our Directory of
Internet Service Providers. It’s currently
about 400 pages, lists 3640 ISPs, and 23
national backbones. If I could make it
any simpler, I would. But we have a dic¬
tum here at Boardwatch urging us all
to make things as simple as possible, and
no simpler.

You can order the directory via the web.
Jack Rickard

♦ ♦♦

KUDOS AND SETTING UP
COOLTALK .ICE FILES

Mr. Rickard,

First of all, kudos to Boardwatchl (It
never hurts to start off with a bit of flat¬
tery... :-))

14 Boardwatch - April 1997

Well, on to my problem...

I work part time at the University of
Colorado, Denver’s Modern Language
Lab as an advisor and I’m setting up a
lab chat page for the Language depart¬
ment (so students can chat with people in
France, Germany etc.), (http://132.194
.41.159/ - but it’s a test server so you
won’t find it running all the time) I’ve set
up some NetMeeting stuff and now I’d
like to set something up so that people
can call in using CoolTalk (.ice files as per
the article in the July ‘96 issue).

I’ve created an .ice file on the server...

[OpenDVE] invite=132.194.41.159

(All the machines in the lab, including
the server, have unique IP addresses)
and a link to it. I’ve set up CoolTalk etc.
on another machine and every time I try
to link to the .ice file from Netscape
(which is correctly set up to deal with
.ice files) it tries to download the file
instead of connecting the two machines
via CoolTalk.

I realize you probably receive millions of
similar messages, but myself and the
Faculty and students from the UCD lan¬
guage department would be most appre¬
ciative of any ideas (seeing as how the
link to your .ice file works...).

Regards,

Dangerous Dave Bruzzone
dpabruz z@ouray.cudenver.edu
http://ouray. cudenver. edu/

-dpabruzz/

Dangerous:

It’s been awhile since we did that story,
so I’m struggling here a bit. Check our
May and July 1996 issues to confirm.
Two problems arise with ICE files.
First, the web server software has to be
set up to deliver a new MIME file type
— in this case ICE. Second is of course
the application link in Netscape itself to
connect ICE files to the CoolTalk appli¬
cation. As I recall, the “gotcha” on this
one is the first case — the web server
MIME type addition.

Jack Rickard

♦ ♦♦

BARE COPPER

Hey Jack,

In your latest issue of Boardwatch,
under one of the most valued columns

within this great publication (Editor’s
Notes), you talk about xDSL. Being fond
of new technology, and having a wonder¬
ful relationship with Ascend Communi¬
cations, we have been gently nudged and
prodded towards implementing this great
new technology. If I read thing correctly,
you mentioned that the current Colorado
tariff on copper pairs is a meager $16.

I’m extremely interested in putting a
solution of this nature together. Us, and
several other ISPs in the area actually.
Could you please give me some pointers
on where to find more information on
this subject?? US West, not surprising¬
ly, is not letting ANY information out as
far as leasing the Local Loop is con¬
cerned. We’d basically be direct compe¬
tition, since we’d be doing everything
the same, same hardware, same tech¬
nology...but with a different price.
(Lower. :)

Any info you have would be greatly
appreciated. And any pointers to infor¬
mation I can gather myself would be
helpful too. Thanks in advance.

And keep up the great work. (:

-= Jay =-

Jay Eno

sysopOscream.com
Network Engineer —

Cherry Creek Internet

Jay:

You’re a scant “L” away from having a
serious name problem.

We think xDSL is going to be a very big
issue shortly. I’m currently working on a
story on just this topic. But as you know
and have undoubtedly come to expect, it
can’t be a garbled hash of press releases
vaguely referring to a coming great day of
more technobabble. So putting it together
is a bit of work. We have to get smart on
the technology—by playing with it—not by
talking to PR people. And as you point out,
the big issue is the copper.

Basically the DSL technologies are an
outgrowth of a desire among telcos, if you
will recall from a few years ago, to deliv¬
er video on de-mand over copper. High-
bit rate Digital Subscriber Loop (HDSL),
Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Loop
(ADSL) Very high bit rate Digital
Subscriber Loop (VDSL) and even more
variants are currently lumped under the
more generic xDSL term.

2 07 . 121 . 43.173

Up to 50 users.

Installs in one hour with
no IPX knowledge required.

And you thought you could only get $19.95 a month for one IP address.

Say hello to Instant Internet, the incredibly easy way to sell Internet connections for Novell or
Microsoft LANs — and make lots of money.

With Instant Internet you can make a profit on the product, charge higher rates per month for
a LAN connection over one IP address, and even offer email, Web hosting and news groups — all supported
by Instant Internet's complete suite of Internet and management software. Unbelievable? Believe it.

Instant Internet. The profit is in the box.

Limited time rebate offer. Contact Westcon today.

Bay Networks David ^outy lnstant l nternet Product Manager

re„p,e connec w i,h us 800-5117235 wvmwestcon.com/internet

Originating with Westel, but increasing¬
ly from a number of other companies
such as Pairgain, devices, essentially
modems, have been developed to pass
data over bare copper lines at increas¬
ingly higher data rates. Initi-ally, these
devices were very pricey (a couple of
thousand dollars on each end), and
could only span distances up to 5,000
feet. As such, the applications for this
were pretty thin.

There have been a couple of things to
alter the landscape very recently and in
significant fashion we feel. First, ISDN
has become more common, and the 2B1Q
transceivers in them have become very
common chip sets with lower prices.
Several manufacturers have been able to
develop circuits based on these relatively
low cost components that will do fairly
impressive data rates under the xDSL
umbrella.

Second, the reach has grown. Fairly high
data rates of 768 Kbps bi-directionally
are now available on distances as far as
12,000 feet. And a company called Tutt
Systems of Pleasant Hill California has
developed a “rate adaptive” version that
will do 768 Kbps up to 12,000 feet, and
384 Kbps up to 18,000 feet, and auto¬
matically select whichever speed works.
Rockwell too has developed an 18,000
foot chipset for xDSL, and many manu¬
facturers are developing xDSL cards
based on this.

In the coming competitive access world
of local telcos, they will indeed have to
lease copper to competing companies at
cost-based rates. What you have to do to
qualify as a “competitor” is rather up in
the air, what the rates will be is rather up
in the air, and in fact the telcos are basi¬
cally vowing to defy all law and democ¬
racy to protect what they consider
“theirs” and not do it at all.

But at the same time, and from the same
mouth, the telcos are trying to make the
case that Internet access burdens the cen¬
tral office switches used for voice commu¬
nications. And while literally all of their
data and assumptions on this are COM¬
ICALLY flawed, self serving, and non-rig¬
orous, they have drawn our attention to a
basic problem. The marriage of a circuit
switched voice telephone system designed
in the late 1880s and not conceptually
changed since then, and a packet
switched data network “cloud” used for
Internet communications today, is basi¬
cally akin to an attempt to get a donkey
and a goose to mate and spawn lovely,

16 Boardwatch - April 1997

talented offspring. Moving to the future, it
probably doesn’t make sense.

xDSL would represent a move to a par¬
allel data network quite separate from
the switched circuit network. So we think
it is important.

Let’s get to today. Competitive local access
is mighty fine sounding, but it isn’t pre¬
cisely here, and you’re not precisely a com¬
petitive telco, and may not want to be. But
virtually all telephone companies have
existing tariffs for what is genetically
referred to as dry copper pairs. These were
copper lines linking two locations, and
were originally tariffed for alarm compa¬
nies. As such, they may be called “alarm
pairs”, “signaling pairs” or just dry copper
pairs. Interestingly, virtually all alarm
systems today use ordinary telephone
lines and modems-there are very few
alarm systems left that use this bypass.

But the tariffs still exist. And so you can
indeed have such lines instal-led—if you
know the magic words. Since they
haven’t been used much in recent years,
many in the telcos genuinely are
unaware of their existence. Others in the
telcos are hoping YOU are unaware of
their existence. And US West in fact is
introducing ADSL service in 14 states at
about $175 per month—leaving a hole
approximately large enough for you to
drive a school bus full of Internauts
through sideways.

We are working on this story as I write.
I’m currently having a 19,400 foot link
installed from our office to one of our
houses, largely because it is at the
extreme end of the range of the current
technology. We have a March 20 install
date. And we are working with vendors
such as Tutt Systems, Aspen Internet,
and others to learn the specific equip¬
ment quirks and foibles to be able to do
this in detail.

But you have to know what to ask for.
What you want is a two-wire dry copper
pair, with NO loading coils on it at all,
and no power on it at all. In US West ter¬
ritory, this is a LAD circuit. InAmeritech
land it is a LADAC circuit. And we are
working on a table listing the magic
words you have to say to get these in all
50 states. As you know, we get conflicting
information from telcos on sequential
calls. The circuit we’re putting in
involves a $261 installation charge, and
two loops at $13.28 each-one from our
office to the CO site, and one from the
house to the CO site, for a total cost of

$26.56 per month. I’m hopeful that over
this $26.56 monthly circuit, we can do
about 384 Kbps now barely, and within a
year 768 Kbps really. It will give us a
good in-ground test loop if nothing else.
We expect equipment costs for both ends
of the line to run around $1,500 total,
and within a year we should see this
under a thousand dollars.

As an ISP, you will be able to connect
some customers using this technology.
But distance will still be a factor.
Currently, the reach appears to be 18,000
feet. The distance from your ISP central
site to the telco CO is part of that. And
the distance from the telco CO to the cus¬
tomer is the other. Our office is slightly
over 12,000 feet from the CO. My house is
slightly over 7,000 feet. And that is a
total of just over 19,000 feet. The line of
site distance between your site and your
customer is totally irrelevant and totally
meaningless. Gary’s house is slightly
over 5,000 feet from our office. But the
total loop distance there would be about
33,000 feet. Maybe next year.

Jack Rickard

♦ ♦♦

ISP & FCC ACCESS FEES

Dear Jack

In the Feb. issue (cyberworld monitor) it
was stated that ISPs are not subject to
the access charge. I have contacted S.W.
Bell and requested the fees not be
charged to me. They just laughed.
Please send me or publish the ruling so
I can fight the phone company. I have
just now got them to send me the sales
tax exemption. I have been paying sales
tax on the modem lines for almost 2
years.

Keep up the good work. Yours is the only
mag. written for ISPs. I look forward to
each issue. Thanks for your time and
magazine.

David Gower
david@gower.net

David:

The reason they laughed is that you’re
not paying access fees now. Perhaps some
clarification of terms is in order.

In 1983, AT&T reached a settlement
with the U.S. Department of Justice on a
long standing series of anti-trust cases
and was broken up into the original

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AT&T long distance company and seven
Regional Bell Operating Companies
(RBOC) serving as “local” telephone com¬
panies. This is casually known as the
“Consent Decree” and the breakup as
“divestiture.” It went into effect 1
January, 1984.

Under the Consent Decree, long distance
carriers would pay local telephone com¬
panies an “access fee” to originate or ter¬
minate a Ions distance call. The access
fees are nominally 3.5 cents per message
unit to the originating and receiving
RBOCs. At the time, this was a relatively
small cut of the 22 cents per minute or so
then extant in long distance service.
Today, it is the BULK of what you pay for
long distance service.

Under the consent decree, a 24-month
exemption to the access fee requirement
was provided to “enhanced service
providers”—mostly data services to
encourage their continued development.
This was supposed to expire on 1 January
1987. The FCC opened a docket for com¬
ments on actually implementing the “expi¬
ration” that was really already mandated
by law. Bill Louden of the GEnie service,
as I recall, first started a grass roots cam¬
paign to stop what he termed a “modem
tax” that would have put a pretty serious
squeeze on services such as GEnie,
CompuServe, Delphi, The Source, etc. in
those days. This modem tax description
was a bit twisted 1 thought, but it did
cause a lot of comments to the FCC, and
the commission dropped the whole project
pretty promptly.

Today, as an ISP, you are terminating
long distance communications to the
local subscriber, and in theory, you
should probably be paying this 3.5 cents
per minute local access fee to the local
telephone company under the provisions
of the original consent decree. But you
most as-suredly are not at this point. The
February article referred to a CURRENT
initiative, entirely driven by increasingly
desperate sounding local telephone com¬
panies, to again bring such services
under access fees. Since the FCC is cur¬
rently trying to implement the Telecom¬
munications Act of 1996, and do away
with access fees of all kinds anyway, this
is doubly hysterical. But it is a serious
initiative of the Bells, and the process
must be observed.

It is even possible that it could happen.
But the effect would simply be to end
flat rate access services—and that prob¬

ably temporarily, and THAT probably
only for dial-up. So it makes no sense in
any direction.

The basic problem from the top of the
industry down is that the apparent
economies of scale are in almost all cases
diseconomies of scale. Large companies
have a very difficult time seeing profit in
$19.95 per month flat-rate services. As
long as you offer them, they can’t very well
offer the same service at $79 per month
and make a case that it represents a good
value to their customers. And so basically
they would like all 3,800 of you to go away
somehow. You’re really mucking up the
whole communications gig here.

The more likely scenario is that at all
levels communications will become com¬
petitive over the next five years, and the
dinosaurs are simply “culturally” unable
to adapt. It does not bode well for their
future. Your model is actually closer to
what is coming. But in answer to your
question, you aren’t paying access fees
now, and I guess I think it’s about a
70/30 that you won’t.

I understand the FCC has received over
320,000 comments on the proposal
now—essentially all of them against
levying access fees on ISPs.

Jack Rickard

HOLDING OUT

Hi Jack,

I held out til the end hoping for a deal on
my subscription renewal. (I lost and
mailed the full price last week) I hope I
still get the “free” Directory of Internet
service providers, (that would qualify as a
“deal” I guess).

Anyway, I wanted to let you know that I
was glad to see you back in “Editor’s
Notes”. Mr. Hakala was very good, but
there was a subtle difference, he just
wasn’t Jack.

I guess your stuck with me for another
year, so keep up the good work!

Gary Binkley

Systems Operations Specialist
Kearsley Community Schools
http://hs-nt.kearsley.kl2 .ml .us
binkleyg@ros sini.lakeville.
kl2.mi.us

http://www. cr is. com/ -binkleyg

Gary:

We’re pleased to have you back. We’ve
experimented with a number of discount
programs on Boardwatch renewals in
the past few years. We get a pretty high
renewal percentage as magazines go
anyway, but of course we always seek to
improve on that. But we have had diffi¬
culty measuring any significant differ¬
ences in response between discounted
offers and our standard offer—which
doesn’t encourage us strongly to dis¬
count.

Additionally, we have been fairly intent
on tightening our readership focus in the
last year, and for a certain type of net-
head, the $36 annual fee just doesn’t
seem to be much of an issue. If at some
time during the year one of our articles
doesn’t either save you $10,000 costs or
lead you into $10,000 of new business
opportunity, you should probably be
reading Internet World or some other
“gee the Internet sure is cool” publica¬
tion. The $36 allows us to prove you care.

We have been running an offer of a free
directory for both renewals and new sub¬
scriptions for some time. I guess I think
that too has to end at some point since
the size of the directory has increased to
the point where the production costs, and
probably even more significantly the
postage costs have started to reach
painful levels. But at $9.95 plus $4 s&h
for the directory, that has become a pret¬
ty significant premium for a $36 maga¬
zine subscription.

Mr. Hakala is no longer with us. We have
added TWO editors on staff, Steve Clark
and Bill McCarthy and I’m very pleased
on both counts. But it has become appar¬
ent to me over the past few months that 1
need to do less managing and more writ¬
ing on some of the technical issues facing
Internet service providers. And so I will
do so.

Jack Rickard

DON’T KNOW WHO TO ASK-
EPIC FRUSTRATION!!

Dear Jack:

I just found an issue of your ISP
Directory and wish I would have known
about it sooner. I just started into web¬
site development in about January this
year and I’m relatively new to Internet

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resources. I hope you can help, or offer
suggestions of where I can get help,
because my frustration level is reaching
an all time high. I am computer literate
and have a fairly good programming
background. However, there is one thing
that is generating rapid hair loss for me—
the ISP/VirtualHost/Domain Name stuff.

I know that an InterNIC domain name
registration is $100 up front and $50
each year after (no problem). My cur¬
rent service provider (who has been
very good) tells me that after the $100
fee, my monthly service fee will go up
from $24.95 to $99.95 so that I may
have access to this domain name and all
of the extras that go with this new
account (on a non-secure server -
$150/month on a secure server). That
seems staggering to me. I’ve heard
many people talking about only paying
the standard ISP dial-up fee (about
$19.95 to $29.95) and having their own
domain name and I’ve even heard some
claim to have it for free.

My partner and I have just started up a
small, home-based business (two, actu¬
ally) and we’re just trying to get a fair
shake on about 5 to 10M of disk space on
a virtual host with a virtual domain
name. Secure server would be nice but is
not critical right now.

Is this $99.95 an industry standard? If
not, can you offer any suggestions of
what is? Or where to go for help or FAQs
on this matter? Thanks for your help.

Todd Berran

toddb@alice-campusystems.com
Todd:

There are no such “industry standards ”
and in fact no standards at all. Almost
anything goes. Generally, it is my obser¬
vation that the $19.95 type accounts typ¬
ically are for dynamic IP address allo¬
cations on a standard dial-up account
with an associated POP3 e-mail
box/address. Some of these accounts do
offer some web space—typically five or
ten MB of space, but under a subdomain
address within the Internet service
provider domain.

Usually, if you obtain your own domain
name the price does go up. One factor in
this is IP address space. An ISP will typi¬
cally have a couple of Class C address
blocks for their dial-up service where each
time someone makes a connection to a

dial-up port they are dynamically
assigned the next available IP address
out of the available addresses. These
addresses are infinitely reusable. Once
you register a domain name, it HAS to be
associated with a fixed IP address, and
typically you’ll get your own Class C
address block of some 255 IP addresses.
Those then are gone from your ISPs use.
Their domain name server would typical¬
ly become the authoritative name server
for your domain. You can run your own
SMTP server if you like and make your
own POP3 mailboxes ad infinitum. And
of course, you can host any number of web
services—even if they are “virtually” host¬
ed on the ISP hardware.

Almost all ISPs move this into the
“business” connectivity category. It is
really quite different than the very
basics provided with a dial-up account.
And most businesses use the dial-up
connection as more or less a standing
connection—they dial-up the service
and leave it “nailed up” or connected 24
hours a day. So the cost of the port, tele¬
phone line, and modem on the ISP end
is no longer “shared” among ten cus¬
tomers, it is dedicated to a single cus¬
tomer. If this is the case with the
account your ISP proposes for your use
with your own domain name, it is
indeed probably a bargain at $99. It is
not unusual to see these accounts in the
$125-$200 range. But they can do quite
a bit more than you probably think you
want to do right now.

But it is pretty rational. Basic service—
basic price. More service—higher price.
That said, it is a competitive business. If
you can diagram fairly precisely ALL
that you really need in an access
account, it then isn’t too difficult to com¬
pare several ISPs to see who gives the
best bang for the buck in your direction.
But I would find it extremely generous
and unusual for an ISP to give you your
own Class C address block and domain
name registration for $24.95.

Jack Rickard

♦ ♦♦

WIDE AREA LOCAL PHONE NO’S

For several years, I have enjoyed (and
have respect for) Boardwatch Maga¬
zine. One of my favorite features (read
first) is the “Letters to the Editor” sec¬
tion. You guys do a great job, but
(being human) you do “drop the ball”
on occasion. :) :)

Michael Muller was asking for advice (or
comment) about the possibility of using
a packet network (specifically Sprint-
net) to provide remote users “local dial¬
up access” to reach his “Poets & Writers”
BBS (NYC area).

Mr. Hakala’s response (and I quote):

“I don’t think private data networks such
as Sprintnet (... stuff deleted ...) could do
much for your situation. Typically, they
charge hundreds of dollars per month per
account, and are oriented towards high-
volume business users.”

My reaction:

Sprintnet provides “local phone no.
access” to online services such as AOL
and Delphi (and has done so for several
years). The Delphi connection is to text-
based Delphi as opposed to Delphi’s new
graphical <web based> system); the
AOL access is to AOL’s proprietary GUI.
With respect to your comment

about Sprintnet charging “hundreds of
dollars per month per account,” be
advised that Delphi currently offers text
based access at a price (to the user) of
$19.95 per month for up to 25 online
hours (access via either Sprintnet or
Tymnet); the Sprintnet access has no
day/time restrictions ... Tymnet access
has a $9.00 hourly surcharge for “prime
time” (Monday through Friday business
hours). Meanwhile AOL is still pricing
“unlimited” usage (via either Sprintnet
or AOLnet) at a monthly flat rate of
$19.95 per month.

Clearly, for the economics to work for
Delphi and/or AOL, the deal they have
with Sprintnet is nothing at all like
“hundreds of dollars per month per
account.”

In summary, Mr. Hakala’s bottom-line
conclusion ... that Sprintnet was not a
practical approach to Mr. Muller’s prob¬
lem (remote POP dial-up access for
users) is most likely correct, but his
rationale was somewhat misleading;
probably Mr. Muller’s BBS does not
have a membership volume that would
allow them to strike a “volume deal”
with Sprintnet analogous to Delphi
(much less AOL <G>); I suspect that
Sprintnet would just respond “not
interested” rather than invoke some
ridiculous pricing policy of “hundreds of
dollars per month per account.” Just my
two cents.

20 Boardwatch - April 1997

WHEN VERIO WANTED TO BUIID A
NATIONWIDE INTERNET SERVICE NETWORK
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SELECTED RECENT TRANSACTIONS.

This notice appear «. matter of record only.

This notice appears ay, matter of record only.

OnRamp Technologies Inc.

A provider of internet services.

National Knowledge Networks

A provider of internet services.

Equity investment to fund customer
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from

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We represented Verio.

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▼/^F ^ASSOCIATES I

Equity investment to fund customer
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from

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We represented Verio.

C& DANIELS

&ASSOC1ATES

appears^ ma^r of record on*

— 1

Signet Partners Inc.

A provider of internet services.

VERIO

Has acquired

NorthWestNet Inc.

An internet service provider in Washington, £

Oregon, Idaho, Montana and Alaska.

Equity investment to fund customer
acquisition and infrastructure expansion
from

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We represented Verio.

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& ASSOCIATES

We provided valuation services to Verio.

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Founded in 1958, Daniels & Associates is a member of the National Association of Securities Dealers Inc. and its professional associates are registered with the NASD. Member SIPC.

Keep up the good work,

FOOD FORTHOUGHT

Ted Rodrick

trodrick@delphi.com
trodrick@earthlink.net
trodrick@aol.com

Hi Jack,

Has anyone told you lately what a great
mag you publish?

P.S. A little plug for Delphi’s innovative
pricing plans ... I’m currently using their
CONTENT PLan, which (paid in
advance) costs me only $34.00 per year).
For that, I get unlimited text-Delphi
access via telnet from my ISP, and
unlimited access to graphical Delphi via
my local ISP and web browser. A ♦fan¬
tastic* deal, IMHO.:):)

Ted:

It is true that the “hundreds of dollars
per account” may have been overstating
the case. But Mr. Hakala’s assertion that
x.25 packet networks, as currently priced
by these companies, was not economical¬
ly viable for what Mr. Mueller wanted to
do still sounds right to me. And the
Delphis and AOLs have moved strongly
away from this type of access themselves
in the past few years, to developing their
own local access POPs and data net¬
works internally. So comparing their
pricing, based on some remaining x.25
access nodes, doesn’t strike me as logical
or appropriate.

The Delphi deal does sound attractive at
$34 per year and you get your own access
where you can.

Jack Rickard

I note in the January '97 issue’s Letters
to the Editor, David Hakala’s reply to
Nathaniel McMullin (pg 16), “AOL’s
nationwide POPs will be advantageous
for travelers...”

The following is part of a message I sent
to my ISP on 970108:

“Food for thought”—I’ve just returned
from several weeks of driving in the
Eastern US. I use AOL on the road as
they offer many local access
POPs...when you can get in. I also called
into your system long distance a couple
of times per day, and in a few locations
used someone else’s ISP and their user-
name and password to access my email
and web site. The thought is this: With
some 12,000 plus ISPs online, could a
process of guest access be established
among them?

A rough idea of working method would
be to log into a local (say Memphis, TN)
ISP with a username of
gsenet.org@nac.net and my regular
password. Seeing this form of username,
the Memphis ISP would contact your
server to see if I am subscribed ($) for
universal guest access. If approved, the
Memphis ISP would open a limited (~60
min/day) gateway for me. Using a sys¬
tem like this, only the users “home” ISP
would be responsible for billing etc. The
“guesting” ISP would only need to be
participating in the “Guest Access
Service” (GAS?), and would collect its
revenues, for adding this feature, by sell¬
ing this service to its local users.

With professional “road warriors” gradu¬
ally shifting away from the “big 3” (AOL,
CServe, Prodigy) to ISPs, a service like
this would be a boon to travelers.

Thanks,

Phil Reynolds

Phil:

I guess I think ISP account “roaming” is
coming. But getting a group of ISPs to do
anything in concert can be frustrating. I
had very high hopes with a company
called IPASS ALLIANCE. They seemed
to have it all together pretty well. I

quizzed the company president pretty
hard, and he seemed to have most of the
right answers.

Unfortunately, many of these small com¬
panies just can’t get out of the way of
themselves long enough to stand still for
success. We received repeated, and I do
mean REPEATED assurances from this
man that the differential between the
price they bought access at and the price
they sold access at in their role as arbi¬
trageur of services was approximately
10%—though negotiated on a case by
case basis. We ran the article, the phone
rang a few times from excited ISPs, and
with the heady aroma of the ink in their
nostrils and a full two afternoons of
phone calls, the business plan changed.
They have quoted several ISPs’ deals
where they basically buy at $1 per hour
and sell at $1.60 per hour—more like a
60% markup.

At this point I regret the story. But it’s not
the first time we’ve been “had” in this
way. In reporting things, we tend to affect
them if they are too small. And I’m sure
we’ve killed this one. They got all excited,
changed their pricing to cash in on the
bonanza, and not being sufficiently
sophisticated or generous of spirit to
know what to do, they’ll undoubtedly
crash and bum probably by the time you
read this.

That said, roaming is a proven concept
in the cellular field, for example, and
someone will step up to put this thing
together so you road warriors can have
access from anywhere. It’s little enough
to ask, and a rather clear need.

Jack Rickard

22 Boardwatch - April 1997

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TECHNOLOGY FRONT

by Jim Thompson
Western News Service

THE ANGIA l-BAHN — FAST LANE TO THE INTERNET FOR THE ROAD WARRIOR

Jim Thompson is
Managing Editor of
Western News
Service in Los
Angeles, California.
CompuServe:
72777,2677, MCI Mail:
321-4127, maiito:
jim.thompson

T Then it comes to the World Wide Web
V speed is the defining factor. Speeds
of 28.8 Kbps and 33.6 Kbps sounded
blazingly fast when first announced,
but it wasn’t long before the slowness
of the Net made those speeds seem like
molasses in January. Those “in-the-know”
have long been getting around the bottle neck
with ISDN. Using a single channel on the ISDN line
you get speeds of 56 Kbps or 64 Kbps (depending
on your telephone provider),

These channels can be “bonded”
to achieve 128 Kbps. Adding v.42
compression (up to 4 to 1 compres¬
sion ratios) to the mix will results in
yields up to 512 Kbps! When you hit
these kinds of speeds, the Web really
becomes a usable tool.

The biggest problems with ISDN have
been the difficulty in setting up the
line and in the inability to connect to a
line at a remote location. ANGIA
Communications, Inc. (www.angia
.com) has solved both of these prob¬
lems with the introduction of the
SafeJack ISDN + Fax/Modem.

This baby has it all — ISDN (Basic Rate Interface,
two 64 Kbps channels and an additional D channel for
control information) 28.8 Kbps modem and 14.4 Kbps
fax — in a single Type II PCMCIA card. Its portabili¬
ty is enhanced by the fact that no external power sup¬
ply or additional equipment is needed to connect over
an ISDN line.

ISDN adapters or devices allow one to use digital
ISDN lines. Although they are look like and are often
called “modems,” ISDN adapters actually function
much differently. While a modem modulates digital
signals at one end of a connection and then demodu¬
lates the signals at the other end, the nature of digital
ISDN phone lines does not require this process. The
result is a much faster and more reliable connection.

If you want to use the I-Bahn combo PC card over an
ISDN line, you will need an ISDN Basic Rate
Interface (BRI) line. BRI operates over the same
wiring as a standard analog telephone line. At the
user end, you normally find an RJ45 (8 pins) or RJ11
(4 or 6 pins) wall jack. The BRI usually contains three

channels — two 64 Kbps (or 56 Kbps depending on
your telephone provider) B-channels and one 16 Kbps
D-Channel. The two B-channels carry (or bear) data
or voice information while the D-channel is used as a
control channel.

For signals from the BRI to be translated into signals
that the computer can understand a couple of devices
are needed. These include a Terminal Equipment 2
(TE2) — normally this is your computer or telephone.

The TE2 requires a Terminal Adapter
(TA), such as the Angia I-Bahn, to
communicate over the ISDN line. The
TA translates between non-ISDN sig¬
naling that TE2s use and the S/T
interface signaling which is used by a
Network Termination (Unit)-l (called
an NT-1). The NT-1 translates infor¬
mation between the short distance
signaling used at the S/T interface
and the longer distance signaling
used at the U Interface. The NT-1 also
converts from the two wires used for
the phone line to the six or eight
wires needed for the S/T bus.

The I-Bahn comes with either a U
interface or an S/T interface. The U interface pro¬
vides a built-in NT-1 while the S/T interface is for
those who already have an NT-1 installed at their
location. Most will want the U interface since it pro¬
vides all the equipment you need in a single card —
something that is essential when traveling. After all,
how often do you find an ISDN line AND a spare NT-
1 lying around. Considering that an NT-1 can cost
anywhere from $150-$350, the U interface also pro¬
vides a substantial savings.

The I-Bahn supports v.110, v.120, clear channel,
PPP and MLPPP (S/T version only). It is compati¬
ble with all U.S. switch types (NI-1, DMS-100,
5ESS) as well as the European standard switch
(NET3) and the Japanese national switch type
(NTT). You can use it almost anywhere in the
world. The I-Bahn also has its own on-board con¬
troller (Active Terminal Adapter) which improves
performance and features a pair of LEDs which
provide instant analysis of the line status. The
LEDs indicate power to the I-Bahn, sync with the
ISDN line, carrier or connection to another device
and ring detect.

24 Boardwatch - April 1997

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Of course, finding a spare ISDN line is something that
probably won’t happen very often when you travel — but
not to worry. The I-Bahn also has a V.34-compliant
Fax/Modem built in so you can use any regular analog
telephone line. If you have ISDN but you need to send
data or a fax to a location that does not, the I-Bahn pro¬
vides for an analog connection over your ISDN line.

The biggest problem with ISDN has been the difficulty
of setting up the line and the software so everything
works properly. Angia has addressed this with a configu¬
ration program that’s extremely easy-to-use. A simple
interface prompts you for some basic information. All you
need to do is enter your SPID and directory numbers
(supplied by your ISDN provider), switch type and proto¬
col, and the software does all the hard stuff. You can store
various profiles for quick access while traveling. The con¬
figuration manager includes a number of other handy fea¬
tures including built-in terminal software so you can test
your connection, diagnostics tools, and a utility for apply¬
ing firmware updates.

CONCLUSIONS

I love this thing! It provides all of the functionality and
features for remote connections one would want or need
in a single Type II PCMCIA card. I found it easy to
install and just as easy to use.

I use ISDN on a regular basis as a fast and efficient way
to send large photo and image files. In the past, I had to
drag along a cumbersome desktop adapter to access a
line and then fight with confusing setups. The I-Bahn
has eliminated all this hassle and made working on the
road much easier. Having a standard modem and fax in
the same device is a major convenience.

The one thing that I do not like is the connector
(SafeJack) used to interface with a standard telephone
line. It is a small plastic connector containing two RJ11
jacks. The nice part is that you can plug a line into one
of the jacks and plug a telephone (instrument) into the
other. The downside is that it is small and easy to lose.
Of course, if it does get lost, you are out of business.

Angia Communications says this is not a bug, but a fea¬
ture, noting “the SafeJack adapter disconnects from the
PC card so that if you happen to trip on the phone cord
the SafeJack releases rather than breaking the jack or
pulling the computer to the floor.”

The ISDN interface is much larger. It is made up of a plug
(that goes into the I-Bahn) which is attached to a cord and
adapter into which you can plug Em RJ45 connector. Since
it is large, this connector is less likely to get lost.

The I-Bahn, as well as all Angia equipment, is backed by
a lifetime warranty which is the best in the business.
The technical support staff is also one of the best in the
business and, to make it even better, is avEulable via a
toll-free telephone number. I have used Angia modems
for several years and found them to be reliable in every
sense of the word.

The I-Bahn is a true winner. If you need ISDN access in
remote locations, you can’t do better than the I-Bahn. ♦

Angia Communications, Inc.

441 East Bay Boulevard
Provo, Utah 84606

Tel: (801) 371-0488
e-mail: support@angia.com
FTP: ftp://ftp.angia.com
Web: www. angia.com
I BBS: (801)924-2350

ANGIA I-BAHN SPECIFICATIONS

Price: $575

General Specifications

Type II PC Card
PCMCIA 2.1 Compliant
16550 UART
Flash ROM

10 telephone number storage in non-volatile memory
Power Consumption — ISDN:
lOOOmW operating mode
175mW sleep mode
Power Consumption — Modem:
lOOOmW operating mode
800mW idle mode
175mW sleep mode
Standards and Protocols — ISDN

V.110/ — ITU standard for terminal rate adaption by bit stuffing

V.120/ — ITU standard for terminal rate adaption with statistical multiplexing

Q.931/1.451 — ITU standard for basic ISDN call control

Q.932/ — ITU standard for control of ISDN supplementary services

1.430 — ITU standard for layer 1 specifications

PPP — Point to point protocol

MLPPP — Multi-link PPP; protocol for multiplexing both B-channels (S/T version only)
Standards and Protocols — Modem

V.34 — ITU standard for modem operation of up to 28800 bit/s
V.32bis — ITU standard for up to 14400 bit/s full duplex modem operation
V.32 — ITU standard for up to 9600 bit/s full duplex modem operation
V.27ter — ITU standard for modem operation of 4800/2400 bit/s on the GSTN
V.25bis — ITU standard for automatic calling/answering equipment on the GSTN
V.23 - ITU standard FOR 600/1200 bit/s on the GSTN
V.22bis — ITU standard for 2400 bit/s full duplex modem operation
V.22 — ITU standard for 1200 bit/s full duplex modem operation
V.21 — ITU standard for 300 bit/s full duplex modem operation
Bell 212A — AT&T standard for 300/1200 bit/s full duplex modem operation
Bell 103 — AT&T standard for 300 bit/s full duplex modem operation
Error Correction

V.42 — ITU error correction procedure for DCEs using async to sync conversion
MNP2-4 — Microcom Networking Protocols for error correction

Data Compression

V.42bis — ITU protocol for up to 4 to 1 data compression

MNP5 — Microcom Networking Protocol for up to 2 to 1 data compression

Fax

V.29 — ITU standard for 9600 bit/s fax
V. 17 - ITU standard for 14400 bit/s fax
Class 1 — Group 3 fax standard
Class 2 — Group 3 fax standard

Data Rates

ISDN Sync - 64K, 56K, 19.2K, 14.4K, 12K, 9.6K, 7.2K, 4.8K, 2.4K, 1,2K, 600
ISDN Async — 230.4K, 115.2K, 57.6K, 38.4K, 19.2K, 14.4K, 12K, 9.6K, 7.2K, 4.8K,
2.4K, 1.2K, 600

Modem — 115.2K, 57.6K, 38.4K, 19.2K, 14.4K, 12K, 9.6K, 7.2K, 4.8K, 2.4K, 1.2K,
600,300,

Windows 3.x
Windows 95
Windows NT

Boardwatch - April 1997 29

What is this thing called ISDN?

I SDN, which stands for Integrated Services
Digital Network, brings the digital network
to the individual user. With ISDN, the same
twisted-pair copper wire that is used for stan¬
dard (analog) telephone lines can carry as
many as three separate “conversations” at the
same time, through the same line at speeds
many times faster. This ability opens many
possibilities, including practical solutions to
such things as telecommuting, inexpensive
videoconferencing, remote broadcasting and
sound transfer, engineering, LAN-to-LAN con¬
nectivity, and even interactive publishing.

The basic ISDN-to-user connection is called a
Basic Rate Interface (BRI) and contains three
separate channels, or “pipes.” Two of these
channels (the B channels) carry user “conver¬
sations” from a telephone, a computer, a fax or
almost any other device. A third channel (the
D channel) is normally used as a control chan¬
nel to carry setup information for the network,
but it can also carry user data transmissions.

According to Pacific Bell, this means that
“two separate ‘conversations,’ say, a voice call
and a computer transmission, can take place
at the same time through the same ISDN
line. Simultaneously, a third ‘conversation,’ a
CompuServe session or a credit card autho¬
rization, for example, could also take place
through the same connection. The power of
ISDN enables all three of these transmis¬
sions to happen at the same time, through
the same copper twisted-pair telephone line
that once could handle only one transmission
at a time.

“Two or more channels can be combined into a
single larger transmission ‘pipe.’ Channels can
be assembled as needed for a specific applica¬
tion (a large video conference, for example),
and then broken down and reassembled into
different groups for different applications (nor¬
mal voice or data transmissions). Combining B
channels in this manner is called inverse mul¬
tiplexing, or bonding,” notes Pacific Bell.

Additionally, ISDN can support as many as
eight separate devices (telephones, computers,
fax machines and more) and as many as 64
separate telephone numbers through a single
BRI connection. Because digital and analog
systems are fully interconnected, ISDN tele¬
phones and devices can call to and receive calls
from standard telephones.

Most standard telephone wiring (twisted cop¬
per pair) can transmit ISDN digital signals
without any changes or additions. However,
some older buildings and homes may need to
upgrade wiring.

You will also need access to a suitably
equipped digital switching system and the
proper equipment.

A digital network like ISDN offers two impor¬
tant advantages — clarity and speed.

Digital signals ignore the static and noise that
often affect analog transmissions, especially
over long distances and older telephone lines.
They offer quiet, static-free, voice conver¬
sations, and virtually error-free data con¬
nections, worldwide.

Second, a digital network carries data at speeds
of up to 128 Kbps without data compression
and more than 500 Kbps with compression.

ISDN ON THE WEB:

Here are some address of web sites that carry
information on ISDN.

alumni.caltech.edu/~dank/isdn
— This is Dan Kegel’s ISDN page and the most comprehen¬
sive list of information I have found anywhere on the Web.

www.cis.ohio-state.edu/hypertext/faq/
usenet/isdn- faq/top.html
— Frequently Asked Questions

www.eleceng.livjm.ac.uk/isdn
— Liverpool John Moores University’s European
ISDN Web Page

30 Boardwatch - April 1997

Attention ISPs:

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Whistle is actively recruiting
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ZOOM INTRODUCES A MULTI-PURPOSE ISDN PRODUCT

Zoom (www.zoomtel.com) has started shipping the Zoom/
Duo terminal adapter that will support data, fax and voice in
addition to high-speed digital data transmission. It offers PPP
connections at 64 Kbps or 128 Kbps and supports V.42bis com¬
pression, which can increase speeds up to 460 Kbps.

But, the Duo is also a fax modem and has a jack for a telephone
handset. Unlike most data-only ISDN terminal adapters, the
Duo can be used as a fax machine and a telephone. It also has
flash memory for easy upgrades in the future

This versatile, all-in-one card has a list price of $349 and
comes with a 7-year warranty.

DELTACOMM LAUNCHES NATIONAL TOLL-FREE ISP

DeltaComm Development, who has designed communication
and BBS software, launched a new service provider. The ser¬
vice, called deltaComm Internet Services, is unique because
it focuses on mobile users who travel throughout the country.

Users pay a flat rate to connect to deltaComm through a 1-800
number. The company has two access points in Raleigh and
Nashville, but users everywhere can use the service. The com¬
pany offers several plans from $9.95 per month to $24.95
per month.

For more information, or to sign up, go to deltaComm’s web
site at www.delta.com/delta/online or call 800-859-9000.

ACCESS BEYOND INTRODUCES REMOTE ACCESS
SERVERS AT $499 PER PORT

Access Beyond’s new line of remote access servers will sell for
$499 per port, placing them among the least expensive servers
on the market.

The AB-T1240 ISP, which supports 24 phone lines from a sin¬
gle T-l, sells for $11,995. The AB-E1300 ISP sells for $14,995
and is designed for 30 E-l lines.

Access Beyond says that it will also release ISDN BRI remote
access servers in May. For more information on any of these
products, see Access Beyond’s web site at www.accessbe

VISUAL WEB TOOLS CD-ROM

The Visual Web Tools CD-ROM is a cross-platform develop¬
ment suite with a plethora of resources for web masters using
the Windows or Macintosh environments. It comes with 250
unique page background designs, buttons and icons, and
HoTMetaL Light.

Web masters can save thousands of dollars on software and
hundreds of hours in learning how to make designs.
SoftQuad’s HoTMetaL Pro 3.0 is among the most popular
HTML authoring software packages. Visual Web Tools CD is
$29.95 (plus $3.95 S&H) and entitles you to a $60 discount
off the retail price of HoTMetaL Pro.

Stop by www.mediaexh.com to see samples, download some
freebies or buy the disk.

VISIT BOTSPOT AND CHAT WITH ELIZA...

THE ORIGINAL CHATTERBOT!

BotSpot (www.botspot.com) is the Spot for all Bots on the
Net including 13 searchable Bot classification databases,
FAQs, libraries, articles, newsletters, electronic journals, con¬
ferences, previous conferences proceedings, New Bots, Add a
Bot, NewsBots, CommerceBots, KnowledgeBots, Search-Bots,
Intelligent Agents and more. Visit the BotSpot of the Week
awarded by Team BotSpot.

BotSpot has received over 65 awards in its first four months
and is lauded as the definitive resource for bots and intelligent
agents on the Net.

USR LAN LINKER IS A HIGH-PERFORMANCE
LOW-COST STRIPPED DOWN ROUTER

US Robotics’ new LAN Linker 56 and LAN Linker BRI are
low-end routers designed for easy connections. The LAN
Linker 56 has a list price of $995 and allows for PPP or Frame
Relay connections to the Internet. The LAN Linker BRI lists
for $795 and supports ISDN.

Both LAN Linkers support IP, IPX, and AppleTalk simultane¬
ously and do LAN-to-LAN routing.

32 Boardwatch - April 1997

Profitable
Solutions
for ISPs

Call 888-959-5959 or
visit FTT at www.ftt.net

FTT is a full-service billing
provider to the Telephony,
Internet and Utilities industries.

COME to
FTT Forum ’97

LEARN how ISPs and Web-based business
providers form lucrative partnerships and market
these alliances to increase customer base.

HEAR how industry leaders provide
value-added services - including Jack Rickard,
Editor of Boardwatch, who will speak on new
trends in the industry.

DISCOVER alternate billing options -
including the phone bill and direct billing - that
open your Internet commerce to a limitless audience.

EXPLORE ways to expand offerings
and create new revenue with little or no
development cost.

E N J O Y a bird’s-eye view of the 18th hole at
the 1997 BellSouth Classic, Atlanta’s PGA Tour
golf tournament, following the daily conference
schedule and through the weekend of May 11.

The LAN Linker models are simple, stripped-down routers
with no missing features. There are other $700 routers on the
market, but most require add-on options for memory or multi¬
ple protocol support.

WEB SITE DEDICATED TO
ISP FINANCING

Stapleton and Associates of Boulder Colorado has launched a
web site dedicated to Internet based alternatives to tradition¬
al business financing. The site, The Digest of Internet
Financing, (www. stapes. com), is really a weekly publication
covering issues, topics, and concerns for anyone hoping to use
the Internet as a resource in raising capital.

Stapleton and Associates is a management consulting firm
specializing in the Internet. Its founder, Paul Stapleton,
will be a contributing writer to this, and future issues
of Boardwatch.

CISCO AS5200 TO INCLUDE FREE 56K UPGRADE

Cisco Systems has announced that it will offer free 56K
upgrades for its AS5200 universal access server. For purchas¬
es made after February 1,1997, Cisco will offer free upgrades
to 56K-flex technology.

The price of the AS5200 has also dropped by 25% to $28,100
for the 48 modem unit. Cisco’s web site is www.cisco.com.

COMPUSERVE TO TEST ALL 56K MODEM TECHNOLOGIES

CompuServe will support testing of 56K modem technology
from Lucent, Rockwell and US Robotics. CompuServe is cur¬
rently testing US Robotics’ x2 technology and plans to offer
service by mid-March. The worldwide online service says it is
also testing fast modem technology based on the Lucent and
Rockwell chipsets.

CompuServe’s position on the 56K issue is that it does not
“intend to deploy any of the proprietary modem technologies
... until an industry standard is reached.”

NEW ONLINE GAMING NETWORK HITS THE WEB

Adventure Online Gaming’s new gaming network, Gameworld
will be launching this spring. Gameworld, focusing on social

role-playing and head-to-head strategy games, is 100% JAVA
Internet-based, multi-player, cross-platform (PC, MAC, UNIX),
accessible online via web browsers (Netscape, Internet
Explorer, Hot JAVA) or runs locally installed. Users can sub¬
scribe to Gameworld for under $10 per month. Gameworld is
continually expanding its game collection. Its unique human
player-referee provides intelligent talking monsters and
responsive immersing plots. Stop by at www.gameworld.com
or give them a call at (818) 796-6325.

PRODIGY ORDERS X2 MODEMS FOR ITS POPS

US Robotics has confirmed that Prodigy has ordered
Robotics Total Control Enterprise Network Hub products for
at least 165 of the ISP’s point of presence (POPs). This
announcement confirms that Prodigy will support US
Robotics’ x2 modem technology.

US Robotics claims that over 400 Internet service providers
are committed to supporting x2.

ISPs can use the Total Control Enterprise Network Hub for
dial-in access. It supports X.25, ISDN, Frame Relay, Ethernet,
and Token Ring.

ICVERIFY RELEASES DEBIT
AUTHORIZATION PACKAGE FOR WINDOWS

ISPs, who are adding
143.23 customers each
month, can now easily
authorize their new
clients’ credit cards.

ICVERIFY has released
its authorization software
for Windows 3.x, 95 and
NT. This latest offering
provides credit card au¬
thorization/draft capture,
check guarantee, and debit
/ATM (the other ATM)
card authorization.

Single user versions are available for $369 and a multi-user
network version is $529. The URL is www. icverify. com

Connect 10 - 50+ computers* to the Internet

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Package Includes:

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34 Boardwatch - April 1997

WE HAVE ONLY ONE THING TO SAY
ABOUT UPGRADING TO 56 KBPS.

llllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllll

The Livingston PortMaster™ 3
Integrated Access Server

It's no secret that to stay
competitive, you need to
upgrade your dial-in network to 56 Kbps.
And the fastest, easiest, and most econom¬
ical way is to invest in PortMaster 3 access
servers with TrueDigital modem cards
now. Then you can sit back and relax.

And later this year, we'll automatically
upgrade your cards to 56 Kbps. Quickly.
Easily. And free. Just complete a simple
registration form by June 30,1997 —and
we'll handle the rest.

Our new hot-swappable TrueDigital
modem cards use K56flex chips from
Lucent Technologies' Microelectronics
Group for blazing fast performance. More
than 400 hardware and remote access ven¬
dors already support K56flex, giving your
network the widest 56 Kbps compatibility
in the market. And letting users access

Psst!

your service with breathtaking speed.

As a PortMaster 3 customer, you'll
also enjoy a host of other built-in benefits
to streamline your network and make
your job easier. Such as integrated ISDN
and analog support. Access routing.
Firewall filtering. RADIUS authentication.
Built-in CSU/DSU. And our proven
ComOS™ operating system that delivers
the ultimate in reliability and scalability.
All in a compact, space-saving chassis.

For details and to order, call us at
1-800-458-9966. Or browse our Web site:
www.livingston.com.

yivingston

^^vvvvvvvvvv Enterprises, Inc.

REALTIME AGRIBUSINESS REPORTS VIA THE WEB

Data Broadcast Corporation has launched the AgCast Network,
an Internet based agricultural business data service. For $29.95
a month, subscribers such as farmers or agricultural profes¬
sionals can get real time agricultural business information.
Because it is a push service, users do not spend any effort
searching for information. It is delivered right to their desktops.

Data Broadcast Corporation is a leading provider of subscriber
based real time market data, stock quotes, sporting news and
gaming information.The URL for AgCast is www. agcast. com.
Data Broadcast Corporation’s URL is www.dbc.com.

FANTASY BASEBALL ONLINE

Daedalus World Wide has introduced COMMISIONER.COM,
a true online fantasy baseball league. For $295 per league,
each manager and commissioner can chat over the web and
receive daily updates. Commissioner.com can also send auto¬
mated faxes to team managers who are not on the Net. For
more information, ther URL is www.commissioner.com.

WEB BROWSING FOR THE BLIND

The World Wide Web is great, assuming you can see the graph¬
ics. That is why The Productivity Works has introduced
pwWebSpeak, a software package designed to help the blind to
use the Web. PwWebSpeak also helps individuals with limited
sight or reading disabilities who rely on magnified fonts or
speech synthesis for their PC needs. Clients can use
PwWebSpeak to access any web site or Internet resource,
therefore, it requires no special server software. A sample copy
of pwWebSpeak is available at The Productivity Works’ web
site. The URL is www. prodworks. com.

THE COMPLETE $1,200 WEB SERVER

Check out Arlis Tyner’s $1,200 Web Server page which
describes a Macintosh-based web server that can handle
25,000 hits per hour, using a 68030- or 68040-based Mac and a
28.8 modem. The URL is www.iquest.net/~arlis/
$1200WS.html.

There’s useful information and links to everything you’ll need
to assemble your own reliable, high speed, web server for
around $1,200. Used 68K Macs are selling for less than $500
and the server software, Web Server 4D, is only $249. An eval¬
uation version is available at www.mdg.com, a web site which
is remarkably fast considering it is connected to the Net
through a 28.8 modem. Really.

AFTER DARK FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

The Wall Street Journal has teamed up with Berkeley Systems
to introduce its interactive version as a screen saver. With WSJ
Interactive Edition, subscribers can now enjoy a screen saver
news application like the PointCast Network with all the con¬
tent of the widely read paper.

The system is available for Windows 95 or Macintosh and
requires Berkeley’s After Dark Online. Users essentially down¬
load stories which are then displayed on the desktop like a typ¬
ical screen saver. Like the PointCast Network, individuals can
customize the content they receive. Unlike PointCast, the
Interactive Journal is $49 per year.

The URL for more information on Dow Jones Interactive
Publishing is bis. dowjones. com

Three Things Vital to Internet Business:

The World Wide Wait Is Over

Content Providers • Internet Service Providers • Heavy Traffic Sites

Web Server Housing
Direct Backbone Connectivity
Rack Space for Equipment
Content Distribution via Replication
Secure Facilities, HVAC
24 x 7 On Site NOC Techs

Congestion Free Transport

10-100 Mbps LAN Access to Providers

Fewer Hops

Floor Space

Maintenance

Extensive Savings

Environmentally Conditioned for Internet Server Sites

Apex Global Internet Services

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36 Board watch - April 1997

free next day replacement program for 1 year*

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PRODIGY LICENSES VOXWARE TECHNOLOGY TO DELIVER
INTERACTIVE VOICE SERVICES OVER THE INTERNET

Prodigy Internet (www. prodigy. com) has licensed Voxware’s
voice-compression and VoiceFont technology. The first use of
this innovative technology in Prodigy Internet is expected by
April. The agreement enables Prodigy Internet to deliver
real-time voice services using Voxware’s low bandwidth RT24
and RT29HQ compression-decompression (codec) and
VoiceFont 2.0 technologies.

Prodigy Internet is available for $19.95 and can be ordered
through major retailers, or by phone (1-800-PRODIGY). It can
also be downloaded from Prodigy’s home page (www
. prodgy. com).

Voxware is a leader in digital speech technology. Its MetaVoice
technology requires very low communications bandwidth and
processing power to reproduce high-quality speech. Similarly,
MetaSound technology delivers high-quality audio through
bandwidth-constrained environments.

The Voxware URL is www.voxware.com. Information is
also available through e-mail (vox@voxware. com) or by call¬
ing (609) 514-4100.

BELL ATLANTIC OFFERS AGGRESSIVE ISDN PACKAGE

Bell Atlantic says it is committed to making ISDN affordable
for its customers.

The 3ComImpact IQ will allow customers to use ISDN for data
and voice. Customers can use the existing wire in their homes
for their Internet connections and telephone conversations.
Following the free ISDN installation, customers are entitled to
a free 30-day trial of Bell Atlantic.net, (www.bellatlantic.
net). After that, ISDN Internet service to Bell Atlantic.net
starts at $19.95 per month. Customers also have to pay for
their ISDN connections.

In Maryland, ISDN connections start at $28 per month for 20
hours. In the six other states serviced by Bell Atlantic, connec¬
tions start at $31.

ISDN can be ordered through InfoSpeed, Bell Atlantic’s ISDN
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Information on the 3ComImpact IQ is available at www. 3com.
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INTEREST!ALERT ANNOUNCES PUSH TECHNOLOGY FOR
INTELLIGENT CONTENT CHANNELS

Bell Atlantic (www.ba.com) has teamed up with 3Com
(www.3com.com) to bring ISDN to homes in Maryland, Penn¬
sylvania, Delaware, New Jersey, Virginia, West Virginia, and
the District of Columbia. The company is offering free ISDN
installation and a 3ComImpact IQ external ISDN terminal
adapter for $259.

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allow any web content provider or publisher to create a broad¬
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new information to customers or interested web site visitors.

The Sacramento, California company says organizations can
create a channel that offers live news feeds relating specifical¬
ly to their industry, deliver newsletters, FAQs and new product
announcements directly to desktops of people who have
expressed interest. InterestlALERT allows web content pro¬
viders or publishers to create professional news pages and
communication pieces and post them daily. Web publishers can
also create news and group filters to provide fresh, relevant
information to web site visitors automatically. Organizations
can put the link directly on their web sites. When users click
on the button, they are automatically connected and can cus¬
tomize the information they want.

InterestlALERT brings users just what they are interested in
based on filters that the users create. Organizations can offer
their own version of the information service through their own
content channels, which can be delivered through Interest-
Alert’s push technology or through upcoming push services
that use Microsoft CDF standard, PointCast Connection or
Netscape Constellation. The cost starts at $295 a year for the
content provider and free to the client. For more information
call 800-547-8288 or 916-985-4445, or visit www. interest
alert.com.

38 Boardwatch - April 1997

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BABB’S BOOKMARKS

by Chris Babb

A MIXED BAG OF BEANS

Chris Babb is a
Senior Systems
Engineer for Control
Masters, Inc., a
Systems Integrator
located in Downers
Grove, IL, where he
designs industrial
automation software
by day. He's a
member of the
Aquila BBS/Internet
Team by night.
Chris has worked
with Aquila since
1990 and currently
handles technical
support, Web design
and construction,
Internet training and
various other online
and offline duties.
In his meager spare
time, Chris enjoys
music, playing
bass guitar, the
outdoors and his
kitties. You can
reach Chris via
mailtoichris
.babb@aquila.com

lirst off, I’m alive and well and want to
thank Jack for giving me the time to get
some of my family and work affairs in order over
these last couple of months. Every once in a while, life
can seem to grab you by the seat of the pants and
shake things up a bit. Hey, that’s no different than the
Internet, is it?

So what has been happening over these last few
months? It seems like all kinds of things have been
going on in the Internet world (like that’s any great
surprise). Let me see, it looks like cable modems are
not making any inroads, are they? Considering that
they can’t keep cable service running through a light
sprinkle, that comes as no great surprise. Also, with
Internet network traffic resembling the Eisenhower
Expressway during rush hour at times, high-speed
Internet access is truly an oxymoron. Fortunately, it
looks as though things are starting to get better.

I think the most interesting thing to happen over the
last few months has been the underestimation by AOL
of how many people wanted unlimited Internet access.
What makes this so interesting is that it proves a
point that I have always believed: You get exactly what
you pay for! You want cheap service, you get cheap ser¬
vice. Working with an ISP has helped me understand
that you cannot make enough money to keep your ser¬
vice going by offering cheap, unlimited Internet access
without sacrificing something. In AOL’s case, that
something was access, access, access. Not just in the
number of modems available to customers, but in net¬
work speed, customer support and above all, their cus¬
tomers’ patience. There were 3 things that I found the
most interesting about the entire debacle. First, and
foremost, with the emphasis that AOL has put into
marketing, I fail to understand how they could possi¬
bly underestimate the demand for their service.
Second, while they had no trouble figuring out how to
make sure everyone paid for the service, they gave no
reasonable options on how to terminate the service,
short of their customers calling their respective credit
card companies and having the charges refused. Third,
I have been giggling incessantly at the commercials
that came out of it. First, Steve Case, walking through
a mass of construction and electronic equipment, apol¬
ogizing and promising to do better. Then came the
ankle-biters and Monday morning quarterbacks; the
TV and radio commercials that spoofed the AOL prob¬
lems and promised bigger, better and faster. Yeah, I
have a life-sized picture of that one.

I suppose that Steve may be setting a precedent. Will
the next thing we see is Bill Gates stumbling through
a mass of bloated computer code, apologizing for bring¬

ing everyone’s computer to a sudden crash from the
latest Microsoft IE? Or maybe he will be begging for¬
giveness for causing everyone to have to invest in a 1
google hard drive and a gig of memory just to run the
latest version of IE and Office? Right. Maybe the next
natural disaster movie should forego volcanoes and
asteroids and focus on the real threat to us and our
businesses— The horror of the never-ending upgrade.
Now that’s something we can all identify with.

Java, it’s still just coffee to me.

Am I the only person who is tired of having my com¬
puter taken over by installation programs that refuse
to allow me to choose which parts of a software suite
get in stalled? Does any serious user actually use all
the pieces that come in a suite of programs? Have I
complained about this before? Anyone who reads this
column regularly knows that I have and I will contin¬
ue to do so until some sense of responsibility sinks into
the skulls of developers like Microsoft and Netscape. I
will say again to these and other developers who
unreasonably believe that I want to use all that they
offer, GIVE ME THE OPTION! I already have an e-
mail program that I like, I don’t want yours. I already
have a newsreader that I like, I don’t want yours. All I
want is a lousy web browser. Allow me to install that
and only that. While you’re at it, give me the option of
what pieces of the browser gets installed. If I don’t care
about ActiveX and Java, I don’t want the code taking
up my space. There, I feel all better now.

Geez, after reading all this, you may be wondering if
there is anything that I do like about the Internet?
Well there is, and fortunately, I don’t mind letting oth¬
ers know about it either. For example, this months col¬
umn is going to take a look at some more of those
great web sites that can help all of the web masters to
get a handle on the technology that springs up day
after day. I’ve taken some of them on before and since
then, many more have popped up, ready to help the
Web look better, feel better and work better. Hope¬
fully, while making it look like you work hard, it will
free you up to do other constructive things... like
sleep once in a while or maybe visit with your family.

Site Builder Network

www.microsoft.com/sitebuilder

We all love to hate Microsoft but sometimes it’s easy
to forget that they offer some of the more useful pages
available on the Web today. This is one of those places
that any reasonable web master should visit, join and
use regularly. This site is filled with so much infor¬
mation and goodies for you to use that I won’t even try
to hit on everything.

40 Boardwatch - April 1997

Raspberry Hill Publishing - GIF Wizard

www.raspberryhill.com/gifwizard.html

SiteBuHder

network

The Site Builder Network is billed as Microsoft’s one-stop
resource for anyone who has anything to do with building and
maintaining a web site. By golly, I believe they aren’t blowing
any smoke up the nether regions about this either! So what do
we really have here? How about this shopping list:

In depth information on how to employ Microsoft’s
solutions to build a better web site— This includes items
such as Visual Studio 97, consisting of Visual Basic & C++ 5.0,
SQL Server 6.5, Visual Source Safe 5.0 and others; ActiveX
technologies; SDK’s; Visual J++, Microsoft’s Java development
tool; web server products; HTML authoring information; secu¬
rity information and more technology information than any¬
one should have access to in any one spot. Truly a frightening
collection that’s well worth reading.

Access to free tools and an abundance of trial ver¬
sions of excellent programs— You may not believe this,
but it is starting to seem as though Microsoft believes that
it’s worth giving away almost everything having to do with
web — providing and design. Then again, if they sink their
claws into you now and get you familiar with these prod¬
ucts, you’d be hard pressed to switch to something else
when Microsoft starts charging you for them. The other
interesting thing is that this is not just limited to Microsoft
products. There are a host of third party products available
for evaluation as well.

Site Builder Magazine— A free e-zine devoted to helping
you make the most of everything found at this site. Complete
with behind the scene information on how others are using
Microsoft products to offer eye-popping sites, the latest tech¬
nologies and regular columns that cover the spectrum of web
design, providing and maintenance.

Member Lounges— What fun could it possibly be if you
couldn’t be a member of something? Microsoft makes it easy
to become a Site Builder Member by offering 4 different lev¬
els of membership. The Guest membership is free and only
requires a few moments of your time to give Microsoft the
marketing information they feed on. In turn, you have
access to a select set of downloads and a heap of tips and
tricks to make you a better web master. Level 1 member¬
ship only requires that you boast to the world that your site
was designed for Internet Explorer by just dropping the
logo and link somewhere on your site. Level 2 membership
requires the above and in addition, you need to plop an
ActiveX control somewhere on your site. Level 3 member¬
ship is more restrictive and requires you to deploy (I hate
that word) what they call “3 commercial ActiveX-exploitive
web sites.” Of course, they also want $2,500 a year for the
privilege. The offerings for the various levels increase pro¬
portionally but I have to admit that at least the first 2 lev¬
els fit my miserly budget.

Again, this is not everything that these pages offer and I sug¬
gest that everyone take a look, join up and feed on the infor¬
mation that I noted. Root around for those topics I didn’t men¬
tion. It’s time well spent.

This company specializes in high-end CGI programs that cre¬
ate customized pages and graphics on demand. They also offer
what I consider to be something useful for web masters who
actually care about the poor souls whose Internet access is
somewhat less than blindingly fast.

The product I am
referring to is GIF
Wizard. This nifty
utility can help you
pare down the out¬
landish size that
some graphic ele¬
ments seem to take
on and makes your
site “bandwidth-
friendly.” Let’s face
it, there is nothing
worse than visiting
a site and watching
the status bar read
“1% of 190K” for
the next five min¬
utes before seeing anything. Oh, I know you can turn the
graphics off, but really, doesn’t that defeat the entire purpose
of the Web? I’d much rather have faster graphics than none
at all. I suppose another school of thought would be to watch
the color pallet and optimize your graphics yourself but I’ll
be the first to admit that there is nothing worse than making
a cool graphic, only to maim it by trying to make it smaller.
Also, I’m no graphics expert and I’d really rather let some
cool utility like GIF Wizard fix it for me so I can do other use¬
ful things.

Here’s how it works, from the main page, you are asked for the
URL to the graphic you want optimized. You also have the
option of selecting the background colors and re-sizing infor¬
mation. After these grueling steps, press the Start GIF Wizard
button. Within a few moments, you’ll have a page that shows
the original bloated GIF you started with and 2 additional
GIFs that while they look amazingly like the bloated copy, they
have been hypersuctioned down to manageable levels. In my
example image, I had fooled around quit a bit to get the image
down to 30K in Fractal Painter. After running GIF Wizard on
that same 30K image, I found that it had dwindled down to a
minuscule UK. Amazingly, it looked no different to my dis¬
criminating eyeballs.

Along with your images are some interesting statistics such
as a pallet summary, pallet hex values, pallet histogram
and the most interesting of all, estimated cost savings
based on your image getting sucked off your web server
approximately 50K times. For me, that cost saving was
something like $113. Very cool. Another thing to think
about is with smaller images, there will be less of a backlog
of requests for your pages (assuming you have a popular
page...that’s the point, isn’t it?) making your web server
faster overall by working less.

Along with all of the above whiz-bang, you will find links to the
Lycos image search feature (very cool), examples, samples and
FAQs to help you create the best looking graphics at the least
cost in bytes. See for yourself.

Boardwatch - April 1997 41

The Bandwidth Conservation Society

www.infohiway.com/way/faster

OK, let’s say that you’re curiosity was peaked in the last review
but you don’t want someone else touching a bit of your very own
graphics. Fine. Then you can live with big ugly graphics (in size,
that is), have people avoid your site in droves because of them,
or, you can learn how to optimize your own graphics.

The purpose of the Bandwidth Conservation Society is to help
you learn how to just that. Information is presented by a group
of web developers whose goal is to be a resource for other
developers who have an interest in optimizing performance (I
wish everyone did) as well as maintaining appropriate graph¬
ic standards.

Offerings on this page include an offline version of the BCS;
Cut-N-Paste Javascript (I like Javascript better than Java!)
which is a severe time saver; tutorials that cover GIFs; logo¬
type; background images; JPGs; optimizing with Adobe
Photoshop; a forum where you can say what you think and fur¬
ther links to the world of bandwidth-friendly suggestions.

Webmaster Magazine

http://www. web-master. com

need to read. Then again, sometimes
it feels like everything that is going
on is coming at you like a pyroclastic
cloud of volcanic gas belching out of
Dante’s Internet connection (some¬
times I also get to watch the
Discovery Channel).

Webmaster Magazine is one of the
highlights of my inbox (after
Boardwatch Magazine, of course)
each month. It is filled with excel¬
lent and timely information on what is happening in the web
industry with the technology and on the sites. As with any
magazine, there are regular categories of information but the
content changes as rapidly as the Web itself.

The site is well laid out and contains links to all of the cur¬
rent information as well as back issues. Subscriptions to the
printed version are free and as usual, you have to fill out one
of those annoying bingo-charts of information that asks a lit¬
tle hit of everything. Be sure to have your #2 mouse pointer
ready. There are also exclusive links to other tantalizing bits
of information that will help your site really stand out from
the crowd.

Sometimes I feel like I do nothing more than read trade maga¬
zines. I read a pile of them each month and I know our cleaning
service would just love to pour the contents of my wastebasket
all over my desk just to get back at me for all of the heavy
garbage cans they have to chuck. Tsk ,tsk. But, to be informed,
well educated, on-top and ahead of the pack, you must feel the

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NUTSITE OF THE MONTH

Be forewarned this site won’t appeal to everyone and if you
don’t like the sound of it, don’t visit it and then blame me for
upsetting you. Exercise some personal responsibility.

Dirty Crap To Say In German

http://cobweb. wintermute. co.uk/moviestar
_europe/swear.htm

My Grandmother was straight from the old country (Hungary,
that is). Some of her funnier stories and sayings dealt with
swearing in Hungarian. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a page on
how to swear in Hungarian, so I had to settle for German.

YES, this page is offensive so if you have virgin ears and eyes,
don’t bother looking. On the other hand, I find German to be a
fascinating language since much of the root of the English lan¬
guage can be traced to it. It is also quite guttural and can send
me into fits of laughter upon hearing the right combination of
sounds (remember Brother Theodore from Letterman?).
Anyway, here is a comprehensive list of German sayings and
their matching English counterparts. You also get a .WAV file
for each of them so you too can excel in the proper and correct
pronunciations. And I thought “Holtzemfrumfloppin” really
was the German word for “Bra.”

For the time being, my web site is down and awaiting a total
make over. Look for it soon!

You can always see my past columns at:
www.boardwatch.com

I’m always interested in reading what you have to say and am
always willing to take a look at a site... any site you think is
interesting, useful or just downright strange. Let me
know about them at: cbabb@aquila.com ♦

42 Boardwatch - April 1997

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LINUX REDUX

by Alan Cox

PROVIDING DIAL-UP SERVICES WITH LINUX

Alan Cox is the
Technical Director of
CymruNet, a leading
Internet Service
Provider in Wales,
United Kingdom.
Cox is also a
member of the Linux
International Technical
Board and the CERT
Vendor contact for
Linux. He maintains
the http://www. uk.

linux.org web
page and leads the
Linux Networking
Project, the project to
port Unix to shared
memory multiproces¬
sor architectures,
and a project to port
Linux to 8086
embedded controller
systems. Send
e-mail to a land
cymru.net

he last article looked at the kind of hardware you
need to get a stable system, this time we’re going to
have a look at some of the more essential tools for sup¬
porting dial-in services on Linux systems.

DIAL-UP VIA DEDICATED HARDWARE

There are two common strategies used for dial-in ser¬
vices. The first is to use dedicated hardware such as
the Ascend PMax or the 3COM (ex US Robotics) total
control racks. In this set up telephone services are nor¬
mally provided in blocks of 23 channels down a T-l (30
channels down an E-l in Europe) over coaxial cables
into rack mounted units that have very high density
modem and ISDN boards. Out of the back of all this
comes Ethernet. These units typically do all the PPP,
the routing and the tedious dial-up modem control
except for authentication.

Authentication is normally provided using a protocol
called RADIUS. This was originally created by
Livingston for their Portmaster products. RADIUS is
an open UDP based protocol that allows the dial-up
equipment to query a RADIUS daemon to verify a
login and password. If available, RADIUS passes a lot
of other information, such as caller ID and connection
types. The RADIUS daemon can provide a lot of infor¬
mation (like PPP settings), and the protocol itself is
quite extensible.

Under Linux, the Livingston RADIUS daemon runs
nicely and uses user/password files separately from
the machine username and password. This is very
important as you don’t normally want everyone to log
in to the machine doing the authentication. You can
pick up the RADIUS daemon from ftp.livingston
. com as well as the various Linux archives.

DIAL-UP VIA LINUX

The second approach, and one favored by many for
smaller setups due to it its low cost for small numbers of
ports, is to use smart serial cards and a Linux box. Some
people take this further and run in excess of 100 ports
off a Linux based PC. The standard PC serial card is not
really that good, it’s perfectly adequate for a single
modem, and the newer 16550A based boards are happy
handling 4 modems quite often. These cards are rela¬
tively dumb, and the processor has to do a lot of work to
keep the modem fed with data and the chips happy.
They are cheap, however, and should not be ignored if
you just need to let a few friends access the machine or
want to provide a small office with access facilities.

So called “Smart” serial cards do a lot of the processing
and provide much more buffering for the PC processor.
As a result the processor often just checks 100 times a
second and copies blocks of data on or off any port need¬
ing attention, rather than having to handle each byte
(or on a 16550A each small block of bytes). These cards
also handle flow control, parity and special character
recognition. Some of the high end ones designed to be
used with external ISDN terminal adapters can sustain
460 Kbps on 8 ports at once.

Above this hardware you need software to handle the
connections, the authentication and the protocol man¬
agement. The first part in all this is getty, which is the
program whose sole job in life is to sit and wait for
calls then fire up login programs. A ps -aux will show
a lot of running getty processes. These are the ones sit¬
ting on the console screens waiting for you to type a
username. When they get a username, they run the
login program and hand over control.

GETTING GETTY

The getty program that looks after the Linux console
is normally mingetty or agetty. Both are simple pro¬
grams with little understanding of a modem and the
fun things modems like to do to you. They are used on
the console as they are small and fast, and consoles
behave in a sane fashion. As any dial-up user knows,
modems fight dirty.

There are two getty programs typically used for dial¬
up. One is uugetty, but my favorite, by far, is mgetty.
Mgetty is only for modems and is totally oriented to
handling them sensibly. See the web page (www
.lanobis.de/service/technik/mgetty/mget
ty.html) for the technical information on this pro¬
gram. Mgetty is far more than a simple printer of login
prompts, it drives the modem directly to allow reliable
dial-in and dial-out, and to be able to monitor the
modem. It supports Class 2 fax and can also recognize
FIDONET connections. There is development support
for incoming voice handling too. Thus with a good
modem and mgetty, you have a fax machine, answer-
phone, and reliable dial-up service.

INIT AND INITTAB

To get mgetty listening on your modem ports you need
to add it to the /etc/inittab file. This is a list of pro¬
grams that init (the first process run from boot) keeps
running all the time. It will respawn new copies of
mgetty whenever the old session dies, and of course
started at boot.

Boardwatch - April 1997

The file format is documented in man inittab. Basically it is a
set of colon delimited lines of the format.

identifier:runlevels:mode:command

The identifier is just a tag for the line, and is used so that
when the file is changed, init can see what is new or deleted
and what is changed. The mode is normally set to “respawn”
which causes init to recreate the command whenever it dies.
Other options include “wait” which is used to wait for a script
to finish during boot, and “once” which runs a command once
only. The command itself is a command with arguments, in our
case to run mgetty.

The notion of a runlevel is more complex. A Linux system has
7 run levels (S,1,2,3,4,5,6). These are different machine states.
Most distributions use ”S” as single user mode (the mode you
get by including “S” as a boot option) which is used for rescu¬
ing screwed-up machines, 3 as normal running and 6 as
reboot. The runlevel field is a list of runlevels in which a com¬
mand should be present. Init will kill or create commands
according to the run level.

Init and getty are only the start of the process. We have not
answered the modem and read the first string that the user
typed. To take this further we need to look at the login process.
Mgetty, by default, will pass the username to the /bin/login
program. This program authenticates the users and, if suc¬
cessful, turns into the login shell. While this is typically some¬
thing like bash or another command line interpreter for many
users, it need not be. Nor do the users’ home directories need
to be ones they own or can write to.

In our case we need to create the users with a special shell.
The pppd program to be precise. This is the program that
sets up and handles Internet PPP protocol connections. This
starts the PPP negotiations needed to pass Internet traffic
and, when completed adds; the interfaces and routes neces¬
sary to make things work. By default PPPD defaults to
client-like behavior and you will need to specify the -default
option to stop it from rearranging your routing table the
wrong way. PPPD itself isn’t an ideal login shell as it is diffi¬
cult to make it pick addresses for given interfaces. Instead
there is a front end to PPPD called ppplogin which can be
obtained from Sunsite (http://sunsite.unc.edu/mdw/
linux.html) and other archives. This reads configuration
files to decide what addresses to use on each port and to
allow some users to have static IP address allocations.

If your users also need to be able to do other things on the
machine you have three choices. The first is to use a normal
shell and require they start ppplogin if they wish to use PPP.
The second is to give them two user names (often this is user
and Puser for the PPP dial-up name). The third commonly
used choice is to allow users other access except for shell
access, so that they can, for example, upload web pages but
not type arbitrary commands on the server. To allow that
level of access you will need to add PPPD or ppplogin
(whichever you chose) to the /etc/shells file. This file lists all
the shells that are considered to be “normal users.” If they
are not listed in that file, the users will not be able to use ser¬
vices like FTP.

SUPPORTING SLIP

Some sites still provide for, and some customers still ask for,
SLIP access. In theory PPP made SLIP obsolete. In practice,
however, many DOS systems and older UNIX setups have
SLIP, but no (or no useable) PPP stack. Thus supporting SLIP
is also required. A program called dip handles dial-out SLIP
connections but does a very poor job for dial-in. A program
called sliplogin exists for this, and works much like ppplogin
(in fact ppplogin is derived from it). Usefully they share con¬
figuration files, so you can use the same addresses for SLIP
and PPP users. Sliplogin starts up the SLIP protocol on a
given port and sits around until the line is dropped. At this
point it dies, and init spawns a new mgetty process to reinit
the modem and listen for callers.

That I hope gives you at least the right places to look to set up
dial-up services. A complete recipe would be far longer, but the
PPP-HOWTO, SLIP-HOWTO, NET3-HOWTO and Linux
Network Administrators Guide can all be obtained from
Sunsite or in paper form. The Network Administrators Guide
comes from O’Reilly and the How-To’s can be found with most
Linux distributions or in the various Dr. Linux and Linux
Bible collections of documents.

OK, enough about modems.

COMMERCIAL OFFICE SUITES AND OTHER NEWS

Various interesting things have been developing on the com¬
mercial software front. One of the really good bits of news from
my point of view is the pending release of Applix 4.3 by Red
Hat Software (www.redhat.com) and Applix (www.applix
. com). Red Hat has been selling Applix for a while, but it is not
a cheap package. Most users haven’t been using the full power
of Applix with its database integration, groupware application
development and other features. The new release includes a
sensibly priced (probably $199) edition without these compo¬
nents but with all the spreadsheet, drawing program, word
processor and HTML designer facilities that people actually
need, as well as import and export filters for things like Word
6 — things the current Applix release badly needed.

Applix isn’t the only option for an office suite. Caldera
(www. caldera. com) have been selling Word Perfect for Linux
for a long time, and have also released Corel Draw for Linux.
Star Division (www.stardivision.de) in Germany, whose
Star Office product is well known to OS/2 users, has been
releasing beta tests free for non-commercial use onto the
Internet (again on Sunsite.). These beta releases require you
posses Motif 2.0, libraries which can be picked up from various
vendors including MetroX (www.metrox.com), Red Hat, and
others, as well as coming as standard on some CD distribu¬
tions. I’m looking forward to seeing a final release. I wonder
when the market size will force Microsoft to port Word and
friends to Linux. I also wonder if anyone will care.

Caldera also announced what was a surprise to many of us —
that they will be providing not just the Netscape Navigator
client with Caldera OpenLinux, but that the “full” OpenLinux
release will also include Netscape’s server product.

Until the next time, when we’ll look at the different web
servers available for Linux....♦

Boardwatch - April 1997 45

lljl JLljvll lillJlY byAviFreedman

YOUR OWN ADDRESS SPACE

E very machine on the Internet
has to have an IP address.

Avi Freedman started
Net Access, the
Philadelphia area’s
original ISP, in
October of 1992. Net
Access is currently a
regional ISP, with
more than 80 down¬
stream Internet
providers and dedi¬
cated-line customers,
and thousands of
dial-up and web¬
hosting customers.

Further-more, it has to be a “globally
routable” IP address—an address that is
allocated to you by someone and that is routed by
your provider to the rest of the Internet (meaning all
of the providers on the Internet know to send data to
your provider to get to you).

So how do people get address space? If you last
looked at IP space allocation a few years ago, things
might have changed quite a bit. And they’re going to
change even more in a few months for residents of
the Americas, as providers start to have to pay
money for address allocations.

Avi also is Cofounder
of a new national ISP,
Net Access USA,
which focuses on
dedicated connec¬
tivity for ISPs. For
information, see
www.netaccess.net.

Avi has been very
active on the inet-
access mailing list
and is a vocal propo¬
nent of the continued
viability of startup and
existing ISPs. He is
also on the ISP/C
Board as Director at
Large. ISPs can join
inet-access by
sending e-mail to

request@earth.

com with SUB¬
SCRIBE in the sub¬
ject. Avi can also be
reached at freed
man@netaxs . com or
http://www.net

The bottom line is this: Unless you’re multi-homed
(connected to two providers) and have already
received and allocated to your customers a fairly
large amount of address space, you’re going to get
your IP address space from your “upstream
provider”—the provider who sells you your dial-up,
ISDN, 56K, T-l, or other type of Internet connection.
They get their address space either from their
upstream providers or directly from either the IANA
or the regional registries.

If you don’t like that answer, and think that you want
or need your own address space, read on...

THE REGISTRIES

The IANA, which holds as a global trust the integers
from one to roughly 4 billion (2 32 , to be exact), delegates
address space to the world—basically, to the regional
IP registries. It is unheard of for ISPs to directly get
address space from the IANA. The last entity to do so
was @Home, which got a /14 (more on what a 714” is
later) based on extensive engineering and growth
plans. Even then, the InterNIC actually made the
entries in their tables at the IANA’s direction.

The InterNIC, RIPE, and APNIC are the “regional
registries.” RIPE covers Europe (www.ripe.net)
and APNIC covers the Asian Pacific (see www. apnic
.net). The InterNIC currently covers “everywhere
else,” including the US and the Americas, and also
hands out address space to global ISPs. This is the
same InterNIC that currently registers the .com,
.org, .gov, .mil, .edu, and .net domains. But that’s
probably going to change in a few months when
Network Solutions, which owns the InterNIC, spins
off the IP Registry into a new non-profit entity called
ARIN (www.arin.net).

A fairly large warning: Under the ARIN proposal,
the new ARIN registry will be charging for IP allo¬
cations. There is currently no charge for IP alloca¬
tions from the InterNIC, although you do have to
pay for allocations and/or “membership” in RIPE and
the APNIC.

Addresses given out directly by any of these reg¬
istries are generally at least 32 Class Cs wide (or
long)—meaning, 32 Class Cs in a “row.” Anything
less wouldn’t be “globally routable.” More on all of
this shortly.

“SLASH” NOTATION AND CIDR

To talk about IP allocations, it’s necessary to under¬
stand the modern terminology used to talk about
blocks of IP addresses.

It used to be that IP address space was allocated in
hunks called Class A, Class B, and Class C. Class A
networks have almost 17 million (2 24 ) addresses;
Class B networks have 65,536 (2 16 ) addresses; and
Class C networks have 256 (2 s ) addresses. Actually,
those numbers are high, since a certain percentage of
the numbers in any network have special meaning
and aren’t available for hosts.

Those hunks are called Classful networks because
of the Class X nomenclature. Currently, address are
allocated in, and people talk about address space
using CIDR (Classless Inter-Domain Routing)
notation.

One of the many phases of “The Internet’s Going To
Explode” was happening in the early 1990s. The basic
problem was that Class Bs were way too large for
some and slightly too small for others. There was
some worry about running out of address space
because of “inefficient utilization” of giving out all of
those Class Bs (if someone needs 130 Class Cs-worth
of address space and they get a Class B, there are 126
wasted Class Cs worth of space). But the real prob¬
lem was that the routers of the Internet were about
to explode and be unable to continue making the
Internet work—primarily because the number of
routes on the Internet was growing exponentially
(more details about this in a later column).

So the tireless worker/members of the IETF (www.
ietf.org) came up with a plan: Extend the subnet
idea to the entire 32 bits of address space. Subnets
are sub-sections of a Classful network. They are spec¬
ified using the “subnet masks” that you’ve probably
all seen. 255.255.255.192, for example, represents a

Boardwatch - April 1997

64-IP “subnet” of a Class C-sized chunk.
A 255.255.192.0 represents a 64-Class-
C-sized chunk of address space.

So, instead of allocating networks in
chunks on byte boundaries, allocate
networks sized any power of 2 from 1 to
32 bits.

They called this plan CIDR (Classless
Inter Domain Routing). The CIDR FAQ
has more details on this — you can find
it at www.ibm.net.il/~hank/cidr
. html. This is mandatory reading for
any ISP.

CIDR NOTATION

CIDR notation names a network by sim¬
ply specifying how many bits, out of 32
possible bits, that network has.

So a Class C in “CIDR notation” is a /24.
A Class B is a /16. A Class A is a /8. If
you want to tell roughly how many use¬
ful IP addresses are in a CIDR-notation
network, just subtract the number of

bits after the slash from 32 and raise 2
to that power.

So, a /24 has 24 bits of network. There
are 32 bits total in an IP address. 32
minus 24 bits is 8 bits. That isn’t “net¬
work bits” is “host bits” (i.e. useful IP
space). 2 s = 256.

If you’re still confused, see Figure 1.

Remember that we said that address
space can now be talked about (and
handed out) in arbitrary-sized chunks
which are 2 raised to some power from
1 to 32 in size. In practice, /8 is the
smallest chunk that’s ever been “allo¬
cated” and /24 is the smallest that’s ever
been “allocated” by a top-level registry
(but ISPs often allocate much less than
that to dial-up or even dedicated LAN
customers).

The smallest network you can talk
about a /32 (a single host)— in fact, the
InterNIC even once accidentally allo¬
cated a /33 (I’m not sure I understand

the details on that one...) Talking about
anything bigger than a /8 isn’t very use¬
ful, as it’s extremely unlikely that such
a beast would be allocated to any entity.

ONE CONFUSING THING ABOUT
CIDR NOTATION

The terminology gets confusing.

“Less than” does not necessarily mean
“smaller than.” If you want to talk
about CIDR networks that are larger
(in number of IP addresses contained)
than a /24 (the old Class C size), you
might be tempted to say “bigger than” a
/24. But there’d be some confusion
about whether you meant a /27 or just
a bigger network (more IPs). And a /27
actually contains fewer IP addresses
than a /24.

The smaller the number after the slash,
the bigger the network is in terms of
actual /32s (host addresses) contained.

If you’re tempted to say “bigger than”
some classless network, don’t. Say “longer
than.” Ditto for “shorter than” instead of
“smaller than.” It’s less confusing.

A LITTLE BIT ABOUT ROUTING

OK, so address space is now variably-
sized. And you need address space. Four
or five years ago, the NIC would have
given you a Class C. But now they won’t
give you a /24. Hey, what’s up?

Well, Sean Doran, in 1995, decided that
Sprintlink’s routing tables were filling
up—and furthermore, that they really
wouldn’t be able to continue to expand
at the rate that they had been previous¬
ly. So he issued an edict: At the end of
1996, Sprint was going to filter any¬
thing “longer than” a /19 from “recent
address space.” This meant that any¬
thing that was currently being allocated
wouldn’t be affected, and “the Swamp”
(the block of old Class Cs and older
CIDR allocations) would not be filtered
on. Only new allocations (205/8 and
higher) would be affected. He wanted to
prevent a problem from happening
(exhaustion of routing table space in the
core routers of the Internet). Actually,
there were loopholes (if you were a “cus¬
tomer” rather than a “peer,” Sprint
would - and still will - hear the routes,
or ‘route announcements’). I’ll have a
column shortly about how the Internet
really works (peers, customers, route
announcements,...) and we’ll use the
Sprint route filtering as a case study.

Boardwatch - April 1997 47

You can search the inet-access; nanog;
cidrd; or big-i mailing list archives if
you want to learn more now.

The current state of affairs is that multi¬
ple providers filter on blocks longer than
a /19 or, smaller than 32 contiguous /24s.
If the InterNIC or anyone else gave you
that much space that was independent of
your upstream provider it’d be useless,
since hosts with those IPs wouldn’t be
able to reach much of the Net.

The simple reason for this is that unless
route announcements (which correlate
to the networks you’re assigned—an
ISP which speaks the ‘BGP4’ active
routing protocol “announces” the
address spaces that it and its customers
use) propagate to almost every other
provider on the planet, remote sites
won’t be able to “get back” to hosts with
IP addresses that have no matching
route announcements.

So when people talk about “globally
routable” networks (address space),
they’re talking about /19s and longer.

THE RULES

The rules for getting your own address
space allocations can be frustrating, hut
they are (despite grumbling from some
corners)generally accepted by “the
Internet community.”

You need to already have used about a
/19 worth of address space (not neces¬
sarily all one network —a bunch of /24s,
/23s,... can add up to be a /19 worth of
address space).

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What does “used” mean? You have to
have “allocated” to customers that much
space, as efficiently as possible, and you
have to have informed the InterNIC (or
your regional registry) of those alloca¬
tions by using rwhois or SWIP (more on
those shortly).

You also have to be multi-homed—con¬
nected to at least two upstream
Internet provider—to qualify. Since if
you’re multi-homed, there will be an
extra route in the global routing table
anyway, allocating you your own
address space doesn’t really hurt.

Why is there going to be an extra route
anyway? Well, if you have a /20 out of one
provider’s /17, for you to get “Internet
connectivity from your second provider,
the second provider must advertise your
/20 “more specifically” than the other
provider’s /17. (This means that your sec¬
ond provider could wind up carrying
almost all of your incoming traffic, but
that’s another topic...)

In any case, if you’re multi-homed, your
address allocations will have to be rep¬
resented in the global routing table
anyway—so giving you your own
address space doesn’t explode the rout¬
ing tables any more than just being
multi-homed does.

These rules are also called “allocation
guidelines” and are used by the allocat¬
ing registry to decide whether you qual¬
ify for provider-independent (PI) space,
and if so, how much.

SWIP

The way that you tell your registry (if
your registry is the InterNIC) who
you’ve administratively delegated ad¬
dress space to is with SWIP or rwhois.
Most providers use SWIP (the Shared
Whois Project). To “SWIP a block”
means to fill out a SWIP template and
mail it to the NIC. Rwhois is a server
that you run on your network, which
responds to address allocation queries
from the InterNIC and the rest of the

world. The idea of running a rwhois
server is that the NIC doesn’t have to
keep track of all of your SWIP templates
and feed them into their whois server —
they just point to your rwhois server
when anyone asks about address space
they’ve allocated to you. Rwhois was
very difficult to install and run for quite
some time, but it looks like it’s
approaching usefulness for most ISPs.

So remember, you have no chance of get¬
ting address space from the NIC—or
probably even more address space from
your current provider—unless you sup¬
ply timely and accurate SWIP informa¬
tion to them. Your provider, needs this
information to be completed to get more
address space of their own.

For current information about SWIP and
rwhois, check out www. internic .net.

SUMMARY

It all seems pretty complicated, but it’s
the best we’ve got right now to balance
the need for ISPs as they grow to evolve
into “having their own IP space” against
the need to both conserve routes in the
core routing tables and preserve IP
space in general.

If you do it all right, you’ll have to
renumber just once. It may seem unfair
that older providers didn’t have to go
through the renumbering process, or
that you may have to renumber into
someone else’s space if you have to
switch from one provider to another
because of poor service before you’re
large enough to just renumber into your
own space, but unfortunately that’s life
on the Net now.

FUTURE COLUMNS

Look for a fairly detailed discussion of
IP routing next month—and we’ll move
on from there to talk about BGP and a
bit about how the Internet actually
works... ♦

48 Boardwatch - April 1997

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CONSUMMATE WINSOCK APPS

by Forrest
Stroud

WHO IS THIS STROUD GUY ANYWAY?

The applications
reviewed here and

available on Stroud’s
Consummate
Winsock Apps List,
http://www. stroud
. com and ttp://cws.
iworld.com.

Forrest H. Stroud is
a recent graduate
of The University of
Texas at Austin.
The Information
Systems and Data
Communications
Management major
is currently working
in College Station,
Texas as a web
developer for
Mecklermedia
Corporation. Stroud
can be reached

E ach month I receive quite a few letters from
readers who are interested in the person
| behind The CWSApps List. I haven’t updated my
personal home page in more than six months, so
I guess I shouldn’t be surprised by the ever-increas¬
ing number of letters. If you want to know more about
yours truly, read on; otherwise, feel free to skip ahead
to the reviews — I’ll try not to take it too personally...

Just short of a year ago I was married to the woman
of my dreams, Joanne Whitehead. The magical date
was June 7, 1996, only one short month after Joanne
had graduated from the University of Texas at Austin
(I still had two more courses to complete). After the
wedding, we packed our bags and headed across the
state to an entirely different world. The locale,
College Station, is home to the Texas A&M Aggies
(the die-hard enemies of us Longhorns). Despite the
burnt-orange blood that runs deep within her veins,
Joanne is now attending the Texas A&M School of
Veterinary Medicine and will receive her DVM as a
graduate of the class of 2000.

As for me, I finally finished those two extra courses
and graduated. After our move I started out freelanc¬
ing in College Station, but it wasn’t long before oppor¬
tunity came knocking on the door. Mecklermedia
bought the rights to The CWSApps List and together
we will be working to take the list to new levels. As for
entertainment, while College Station might be lack¬
ing with fun things to do, we have our own personal
zoo to keep us happy (and busy). Roemer is our one-
year old chocolate lab cross, Svoda Pop is our six-
month old Dalmation pup, and Bo Miggy and Odie
Pez are our two adorable kittens. With two cats and
two extremely energetic dogs there’s never a dull
moment at our house.

That about wraps up the last six months. I’m going to
try to make an update soon to my personal page with
pictures of our wedding and of the zoo. If you’re not
bored out of your mind yet, you might want to take
a look at it: ww.tcac.com/~neuroses. And as
always, feel free to send any feedback or questions to
neuroses@tcac.com.

RealAudio was the first client released on the Net
that allowed users to download and run audio clips in
real-time — i.e. the sound bytes run while being
downloaded, not after. Since its initial release in June
of 1995, RealAudio has continually evolved to stay
one step ahead of the competition while still manag¬
ing to retain its freeware status. Its affordability and
reputation for outstanding audio quality are two of

■ Description: Real-time audio and video on-demand

streaming for the web

1 Pr ° S:

Outstanding real-time audio and video on
demand. Server, encoder, and player 1

programs all available

■ C ° nS:

RealPlayer clips must be run from a 1

specialized server in order to utilize real-time 1
streaming technology

!H Location:

http://get. real. com/products/play I

er/download. html

B Status:

Freeware. Commercial RealPlayer Plus
release also available — $29.99

Hi Company:

Progressive Networks

■ WebSite:

http://www. real. cam/

the reasons that RealAudio has become the most pop¬
ular client of its type on the Net. Seeking to capital¬
ize on its potential and augment its popularity,
Progressive Networks (developers of RealAudio)
worked with Iterated Systems (developers of
ClearVideo) to integrate ClearVideo’s real-time on-
demand video streaming technology into the latest
release of RealAudio. This release, now called
RealPlayer, makes it possible to view both audio and
video clips on the Web at the same time. Considering
the size of many sound clips (250+ KB not uncom¬
mon) and video segments (2+ MB), as well as the
sluggishness of the Web, the audio- and video-on-
demand streaming made possible by RealPlayer is
indeed a blessing for many users. Matched in capa¬
bilities by only VDOLive and StreamWorks, Real¬
Player looks to have the early lead in what will likely
become an extremely intense race for market share.
While RealPlayer’s advantage is primarily due to the
large number of sites that serve RealAudio and
RealVideo content, another important factor has been
the massive improvements made to the client in its
two years of existence.

The RealPlayer client that combines RealAudio and
the new RealVideo technology is a far cry from the
RealAudio player introduced nearly two years ago.
RealAudio’s mainstay has always been on-demand
streaming of audio, but recent features like live
broadcast capability, improved sound quality for 28.8
Kbps (stereo sound) and faster net connections (near-
CD quality), improved delivery technology, the real¬
time on-demand video capabilities of RealVideo, and
similar added features have taken this client to new
levels. Additional features that have recently been
implemented include bandwidth negotiation (for cus¬
tomizing audio quality to your connection speed),

50 Boardwatch - April 1997

multicasting support, pseudo-streaming for small audio files,
multimedia synchronization, and Java integration capabili¬
ties. While there will continue to be a freeware version avail¬
able on the Net, a $30 commercial version called RealPlayer
Plus has also been released that improves on the freeware
client by offering PerfectPlay, a feature that makes possible
near-CD quality audio and full-motion video even at speeds as
low as 28.8 Kbps. RealAudio was the first real-time audio
client to offer plug-in support for Netscape. Today, RealPlayer
adds to these capabilities with inline web support for audio-
and video-on-demand content. Both Netscape and Internet
Explorer will automatically play *.ra, *.rm, and *.rpm files —
sound and video clips are not only run seamlessly from your
browser, they begin playing almost immediately after clicking
on the file.

While listening to and viewing RealPlayer files is just great for
the majority of us, there will inevitably come a time when
some users want to create and serve their own files.
Thankfully, Progressive Networks has already developed
clients that will create (RealPlayer Encoder — www.realau
dio.com/hpproducts/encoder) and serve (RealPlayer
EasyStart Server — www.real.com/products/server)
RealAudio and RealVideo files. The encoder client is freeware
and allows you to create and host your own clips utilizing
pseudo-streaming capabilities on any type of web server.
However, to run clips on the web in real-time you’ll need to
purchase one of the EasyStart servers, which begin at $295
(you can also download the server for a free thirty day evalua¬
tion). Overall, RealPlayer is a class-act app that will appeal to
anyone who has ever had to wait an eternity just to enjoy a
thirty-second audio or video clip. And with the prevalence of
RealAudio and RealVideo files on the web, this is one app
you’ll definitely want to have for your online daily web surfing.
There’s even a TV Guide-type listing called Timecast
(www.timecast.com) that lists all the RealPlayer content
currently available on the Net. While there is definitely room
for improvement in the quality of audio and video streaming
technology, RealPlayer shows that you don’t need to wait for
the arrival of cable modems and ADSL lines to enjoy real-time
true multimedia web content.

port for a wide range of image (JPEG, GIF, PNG, TIFF, BMP,
WMF, EMF, ICO, and PCX), video (AVI, MPEG, MOV), sound
(WAV, MID, RMI, AIFF, AU, SND, MP2), and cursor (CUR and
animated cursors, ANI) formats. Additionally, the Xplorer can
extract icons for you from ICO, ICL, DLL and EXE files.
There’s a built-in file manager for quickly locating multimedia
files, and if you need a little more help than the file manager
offers, you can also put the client’s Multimedia Detective to
use. It searches through your hard drive and folders for multi-
media and image files and then displays the results for you.
Accessing any file from the detective is one simple mouse click
away. Multimedia Xplorer also offers a whole lot more than
just viewing capabilities. A Logo Changer option allows you to
change the default startup and shutdown logos for Windows
95 and NT. The unique QuickPicker and Destinations features
allow you to save your most commonly used folders for quick
access. Additional features include a File Filter (for showing
only files of a certain type), drag n’ drop support from the
Windows Explorer, a built-in slide show editor, manual or
automatic slide show capabilities, and the ability to set any
image as your desktop wallpaper.

At only $20, this is one application that you’ll definitely want
to try out and, more than likely, continue to use on a regular
basis. However, there are some features currently absent from
the client that would make Multimedia Xplorer even better.
First, a plug-in version would help distance the Xplorer fron
its closest competition, Thumbs Plus, and would also make the
app an invaluable partner to your favorite web browser.
Perhaps even more importantly, it would allow you to get rid
of some excess applications by consolidating your collection of
plug-ins. Second, an integrated screen capture client for bring¬
ing desktop images and movies into the Xplorer would be
extremely useful. Finally, while the Xplorer does allow you to
individually convert a file from one type to another, there are
no batch conversion capabilities for automatically converting a
group of files. Overall, with support for more multimedia types
than Thumbs Plus and a cheaper price tag ($20 compared to
$50), Multimedia Xplorer is unquestionably the best applica¬
tion currently available for handling nearly every single media
type encountered on the web. You heard it here first — this
may well be the multimedia answer to Quick View Plus!

Multimedia Xplorer is an exciting new one-of-a-kind, all-in-
one 32-bit multimedia viewer. Whereas in the past you would
need a separate application to view each type of image, sound,
movie, icon, etc., now all you need is Multimedia Xplorer. The
client provides an easy-to-use click n’ view interface with sup-

While the majority of us are still using Netscape as our pri¬
mary browser, it’s hard not to notice the vast improvements
made to Internet Explorer over the last year. And for the first

Boardwatch - April 1997 51

time a browser other than Netscape
offers proprietary features worthy of
garnering support from die-hard users
of the competition. If you’ve ever consid¬
ered jumping the fence to see if the grass
really is greener on the Microsoft side,
you should first try out SoftCom’s plug¬
in for Netscape (3.0 and later) called Sir
Browse-A-Lot. As long as you have
installed copies of Internet Explorer 3.0
and Netscape 3.0 (or later), you can use
this plug-in to view Internet Explorer-
enhanced sites, run VBScript and
ActiveX controls, view sites that incor¬
porate style sheets (Netscape 4.0 can
also do this without the Sir Browse-A-
Lot plug-in), and much more. Sir
Browse-A-Lot allows you to perform all
of these activities from within the
Netscape environment and without hav¬
ing to load Internet Explorer. The only
real downside is that once the plug-in
begins, some of the Netscape functions
won’t operate as they normally do (only
when you are visiting Internet Explorer-
enhanced sites). For example, using the
back button returns you to the page
prior to the one that first made use of
the plug-in rather than returning you to
the previous page viewed. This also
applies to other options like the forward
button, view source, and print document
command. Aside from this minor nega¬

tive point, Sir Browse-A-Lot will appeal
to those who want the best of both
worlds — the great interface and fea¬
tures of Netscape, as well as all the func¬
tionality of Internet Explorer. Sir
Browse-A-Lot is also useful for web mas¬
ters who want to take advantage of
Internet Explorer’s proprietary features
but at the same time also want to offer
Netscape users full access to their sites.

How would you like
to take up to six of
your closest friends
on a cruise through
Netscape or Inter¬
net Explorer? How
about being able to
talk to associates
without needing to
know their Inter¬
net Protocol (IP)
address — much
less what an IP
address even is?

PowWow gives you
the opportunity to
do both of these
tasks and more. By
registering yourself with the PowWow
server, PowWow users can contact you
for text-based (and now voice-based)
one-to-one conversation — all they

need to know is your e-mail address!
Users can also send files to each other
while conversing. PowWow is a dramat¬
ic improvement over clients like
WinTalk and Sticky Notes, which force
you to know the IP address of the per¬
son with whom you want to communi¬
cate. As with VocalTec’s Internet
Phone, even users with dynamic IP
addresses can send and receive calls.

If the texVvoice-based conversation gets
old after a while and adventure beckons,
try out PowWow’s cruise control feature.
By launching a cruise, you assume lead¬
ership of up to six followers. Netscape
(or Internet Explorer) will launch on
each machine, and, as the leader, you are
able to call the shots and take the others
on a tour of your favorite Internet sites.
Additional new features, including a 50-
user conference mode, a white board for
collaborative drawing, and half- or full-
duplex voice-chatting capabilities, add
to an already stacked communications
feature-set. Additionally, there’s a sepa¬
rate version of PowWow that has been
released specifically for kids. PowWow
for Kids is designed to allow youngsters
(up to age 13) to chat in a protective
environment that prevents access by
prowling adults who lack the best of
intentions. Check out the Kids PowWow
page (www. tribal. com/kids .htm) for
more information. For all of your text-
and voice-based chatting needs, as well
as your cruise control cravings, PowWow
is the client of choice. ♦

Your ONE STOP SOURCE for On-line Services

52 Boardwatch - April 1997

GTEK introduces

Cyclone

Serial Expansion Units!

Intelligent UART serial boards
are an exciting addition to our
already outstanding line of
communications products. The
Cyclone Family is impressive
engineering that will take the
industry by storm!

Cyclone!6 is shown. Cyclone32 is available as an upgrade or complete unit.

Performance ahead of the pack!

Cy CLONE

Serial Expansion Units
16 and 32 ports available!

Meets the
standards for
ISDN modems
and beyond!

460.8

Kbps!

I ncredible speed with
second generation 16C654
UARTS! But we didn’t
stop there. Large 64 byte
transmit/receive FIFOS and
automatic handshaking do all
the work with resultant data
rates up to a remarkable 460.8
Kbps! No other 16 port board
can make this claim!

Pricing Available
for OEM and
Resellers

S etup is a breeze! With
flexible configuration!
Our innovative interface
board, packed with powerful
features includes 8 addressing
modes and 9 IRQ selections
— perfect for operating
systems that support shared
IRQ’s, like Windows NT and
Windows 95. Linux, DOS,
and OS/2 are supported.

Works with all types of
modems — including ISDN.

P riced competitively —
You’ll see that the
Cyclone Family Serial
Expansion Units are unlike
any other multiport board on
the market today. These new
products are the solution to
Internet and Intranet
Connectivity! Check the
competition - no one beats
GTEK!

ATTENTION ISP's!

Ask about our
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TEK

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E-mail: spot@gtek.com • World Wide Web: www.gtek.com

Tomorrow's Communications Solutions

Tour customer

calls in

dazed and confused.

Bombarded by modem claims
and misclaims.

You are his beacon

in the fog.

Ttbu are his light.

He savs help me.

This 5GK thing...

which one?

You take a deep breath

and tell him.

“ Simple. Anything with Rockwell.

Listen. You like the speed of 56K, correct?

The thought of blistering through graphics and
data. I mean, who wouldn’t want to download
from the Net at twice the speed.

The problem is compatibility.

T °« expect to connect, ri s ht?

But pick the wrong modem—you know,
one that doesn’t talk to your online service

provider in the same language—
and your 56K just slams on its
airbrakes. You’re looking at 33.6.

Maybe 28.8. Or maybe even—here’s a scary thought—14.4.

Bingo. You’re back in the Dark Ages.

So here’s the deal. Look for any modem with a Rockwell
K56flex T chip inside.

That’s it. It’s the most widely accepted 56 Kbps technology
in the industry.

They’ve already got over 300 Internet and online service providers
supporting them. And over 100 PC and modem manufacturers. Way more
than anybody else.

Probably because they know Rockwell’s been a standards leader since
modems began. Seventy-five percent of all the modems in the world, in fact,
have a Rockwell chip inside. Seventy-five percent.

So it’s easy. Just pick any modem with a Rockwell K56flex logo on
the outside. Can’t go wrong.

Ajid, hey. Have a nice day . r 9

4L* Rockwell

www.nb.rockwell.com

ONLINE GAMES

I nternet gaming has come a long way since
the days of table tennis and Pong on the
old Atari. As the years have passed, we’ve
seen a stunning variety of TV and computer-
based games. The latest craze is the explosion
of online gaming over the Internet.

Scott Swedorski
is president
and founder of
TUCOWS, The
Ultimate Collection of
Winsock Software.
He lives in Flint,
Michigan with his
wife, Vicky and 2
daughters, Emily and
Ashley. After joining
the army at the
tender age of 17,
Scott received his
degree in Computer
Information Systems
from Mott College,
and received an
Honorable Discharge
after 8 years service.
Scott welcomes input
from Internet users
and software devel¬
opers at tucows
0tucows.com.

Online games, like PC and ColecoVision-style games,
started with rather humble beginnings. The first
games were ASCII-text based, usually role-playing
games or Multi-User Dungeons — based on the
“Dungeons and Dragons” formula. Later, BBS and
Internet gamers were able to play chess and checkers
in ASNI and RIP-based platforms. Now, thanks to
faster modems and better compression/streaming
technologies, highly-graphical aerial and space com¬
bat games have been developed.

While these new types of Internet games may offer
better graphics and stimulation, they do require more
from your system. Internet games typically require
Windows 95 Pentium PC, 10-30 MB of disk space and
a minimum of 16-32 MB of RAM. If you’re not running
at least at 28.8 Kbps it’s definitely time for an upgrade
(unless you want to settle for Pong).

Another new component to the online gaming pro¬
grams is Microsoft’s DirectX. DirectX is a set of
Windows drivers, developed to provide Windows 95-
based programs with high-performance, real-time
access to available hardware on current computer sys¬
tems. DirectX runs about 3-6 MB and it is required for
a lot of the new graphically-intensive games.

Developers are finally learning how to write programs
for modem users and not for the privileged few who
have dedicated T-l connections All of the games listed
below work marvelously on a 28.8 Kbps modem. I
played SubSpace (see below) on a T-l and I noticed
that it was too fast, and the response time made it to
difficult to play.

My prediction: Watch for online games to become big¬
ger, faster and more detailed, requiring ever more sys¬
tem resources. They will also be easier to play, more
accessible and more varied.

WINDOWS 95 SOFTWARE

SubSpace is a fast-paced shoot-em-up space game
played entirely over the Internet with live opponents.
You can pick up “powerups,” improve your ship as you
go, and chat with other players. After you pick one of
six different ship styles, each with a different configu¬
ration, you are dropped into a maze-like outer space
world, where you play with up to 100 people on each

“zone.” The zones vary from Chaos Zone, a free-for-all,
to the Turf Zone, where your team’s goal is the taking
and keeping of territory. There are currently 6 zones
available to players, and the graphics are excellent.

SubSpace plays so flawlessly on a 28.8 Kbps modem
connection that it’s hard to believe that you are actu¬
ally online. You pick up powerups to make your ship
better as you go on, increasing your weapons, your
energy recharge rate, speed, maneuverability and
much more including single use special items.
SubSpace is similar in some ways to the old Asteroids
game, except you also have other players actively try¬
ing to shoot you down. Flying is a challenge, and takes
some practice to perfect.

|5terararargr|

Boardwatch - April 1997

NetTrivia permits players to access 11 topic-specific areas to
compete and answer trivia questions while enjoying real-time
online chat in a graphical environment. The game is unique in
several respects in that players not only answer questions,
they may add new questions to the game, ensuring a constant
source of new questions for trivia fans. The neat part is that
you can play in your own living room against users from
around the world. The players are friendly and welcoming, and
the game is designed to not only be competitive, but social as
well. The Windows client includes an easy-to-understand lay¬
out, as well as special-effect sounds, and a Java version is
available for direct play through the Weh (www.nettrivia
.com/nettrivia/java/index.html). NetTrivia is free to
use for a trial period, after which you must purchase a mem¬
bership to continue playing the game.

WINDOWS 3.X SOFTWARE:

zMUD allows you to enhance and manage your favorite MUDs
(Multi-User Dungeons). zMUD provides many useful tools,
such as actions, macros, keys, buttons, scripts, etc., to make
your MUD life easier. There is a built-in database of game loca¬

tions. MUDs are role-playing adventure games, usually text-
based, with a fantasy, mystery or medieval theme. A good place
to try out zMUD might be Realms of Despair, a popular MUD
located at www. game. org.

zMUD offers a feature called “path memory.” You can save fre¬
quently-used travel routes and automatically play back the paths,
and make up aliases to ease frequently-used commands. zMUD
has “triggers” so you can set the client to automatically send a
command or series of commands when a specific “trigger” action
happens. There is also a “tick timer” to send a command or series
of commands every few seconds to avoid disconnection time-out.

While zMUD has configurations for most popular formats
built-in (aliases, etc.), it also offers custom configuration
options to more experienced MUD players.

|5fergrgrgrar|

MACINTOSH SOFTWARE:

Excellent graphics and interactive chat, paging, and bulletin
boards make this an appealing site. You can play Chess,
Hearts, Bridge and more over the Internet, against real peo¬
ple, free of charge. When you log in to the Internet Gaming
Zone, you can see tables with games in progress. Click an
empty chair at a table to create a game. A Start button will
appear on the table — click it to begin a game. Nervous about
joining? You can watch the games other people are playing
before jumping in.

Gamers can compete with other players, play against the com¬
puter, or mix and match. You may be obligated to purchase copies
of some games from retail outlets before you can play them
through the Gaming Zone. New games are added all the time.^

|5yg*jg*grg»l

Boardwatch - April 1997 57

After bouncing back
and forth between
finance, publishing
and the Internet,
Paul Stapleton has
landed squarely in
the middle. He is
Managing Director
of Stapleton &

Internet focused
financial consulting
firm. His clients
include major players
as well as start ups
and middle market

Paul Stapleton is
also editor of ISP
Report (to subscribe,
e.mail ispreport
Smediabiz. com or
call 303-271-9960 or
fax 303-271-9965;
annual rate is $1950;
sample issue sent on
request) the newslet¬
ter of record for
financial activity in
the ISP industry and
publisher of The
Digest of Internet
Financing, a web site
and newsletter com¬
menting and report¬
ing on deals that link
the buy side and sell
side via the Internet.
Paul welcomes com¬
ments and sugges¬
tions at paulstapes
@aol. com. He lives
in Boulder, CO with
his lovely new bride.

' What’s all that effort
* really worth?

Sure a lot of personal pride,
hut what would a completely
unemotional third party say?

T o try to answer that question, we have (1) started
this column for Boardivatch readers; and (2) cre¬
ated an index of publicly traded ISPs (that is, publicly
traded companies that earn a substantial portion of
their revenue from the sale of
some form of Internet access). To
accurately reflect the market,
companies involved in every
aspect of the Internet access busi¬
ness are included. There are
backbone providers like DIGEX
Inc. and Touch Tone America,
through its GetNet International
subsidiary; national consumer
ISPs such as MindSpring Enter¬
prises, IDT, Earthlink Network;
wholesale access suppliers like
PSINet and BBN Planet, a sub¬
sidiary of BBN Corporation; On¬
line services that now offer Web
access such as America Online
and CompuServe; even local
ISPs, such as Rocky Mountain
Internet and Online System
Services and hybrids like NET¬
COM that still want to do a little
of everything. The index even
includes two international companies; OzMail the
largest Australian ISP traded on the NASDAQ, and
Canada’s largest ISP, iSTAR Internet inc. trading on
the Toronto Stock Exchange.

"ISP owners and
managers will
have to consider
the value of
their businesses
more frequently.

There will be
buyout offers

The index simply reflects the marketplace today. I am
not recommending you buy it or short it, or any piece
of it. Since joining the trading fray three years ago,
the stock prices first skyrocketed. Then crashed. Only
recently have they begun to approach some degree of
normalcy by traditional business valuation measures.

From December 1994 to May 1995 marquee Wall
Street investment banks took NETCOM, then

UUNET, then PSINet public. Investors had Internet
fever and each stock was soon trading well above its
IPO price. At one point they were trading at over 50
times their sales—not profits, sales.

Just as suddenly, from mid 1995 through early 1996,
the stock price of ISPs tanked. Analysts predicted a
major industry shakeout in which only the large tele¬
coms such as AT&T, MCI and the RBOCs would sur¬
vive. Investors in UUNET, the strongest franchise of
the three, survived when management sold to MFS
which quickly turned around and sold out to
WorldCom. Investors in NETCOM and PSINet have
yet to see those old prices again.

Starting about a year ago, the markets calmed down
and a few well managed ISPs, with sound strategies
such as IDT Corp., MindSpring
Enterprises and Earthlink Net¬
works went public. But they
came out at much lower valua¬
tions, underwritten by solid
investment banks, not the fair
haired boys of technology
finance. (They had moved on to
greener pastures and were now
selling over priced stock in
search engine companies). Today,
those recent IPOs now trade at
about their offering price (except
for IDT which has seen its base
fall since October; “why” is a
topic for another column).

Today, I think we are now enter¬
ing the fourth era of ISP finance.
It has three major elements:

1) The ISP industry is not going
to be dominated by major telcos.
Our index of publicly traded ISPs shows they grew
revenue bases approximately 250% over the last year.

2) The ISP industry is segmenting into a retail, whole¬
sale, consumer, corporate and backbone business. Our
index includes ISPs from each of these categories.

3) This era will be a time of Mergers and
Acquisitions (M&A). MindSpring bought PSINet’s
consumer business and has completed over six pur¬
chases in Florida alone. Privately held Verio Inc.
raised $80 million to buy and invest in locally man¬
aged ISPs and build a backbone. Even a regional
player like Rocky Mountain Internet decided to

Boardwatch - April 1997

ISP Report Market Index

SYMBOL EXCHANGE COMPANY

PRICE MARKET One Year

3/12/97 CAPITALIZATION SALES

(millions) Growth

AOL NYSE

BBN NYSE

CSRV NASD

DIGX NASD

ELNK NASD

IDTC NASD

WWW TSE

MSPG NASD

NETC NASD

WEBB NASD

OZEMY NASD

PSIX NASD

RMII NASD

TONE NASD

America Online Inc. $44.25

BBN Corporation $20.13

CompuServe Corporation $10.13

DIGEX Incorporated $10.63

Earthlink Network Inc. $10.69

IDT Corporation $ 6.00

iSTAR Internet, Inc. $ 3.05

MindSpring Enterprises, Inc. $ 8.25

NETCOM On-Line Comm Svcs. $ 9.23

Online System Services $ 4.00

OzEmail Limited $ 8.50

PSINet Inc. $ 7.13

Rocky Mountain Internet, Inc. $ 2.25

Touch Tone America, Inc. $ 0.94

$4,158.92
$ 422.89
$ 937.58
$ 119.90
$ 100.92
$ 125.05
$ 57.52

$ 61.68
$ 107.40
$ 12.39

$ 86.70

$ 285.50
$ 8.72

$ 3.12

41%

51%

10%

208%

566%

225%

1,162%

714%

130%

557%

201%

132%

180%

$ 10.37 $ 6 , 488.27 321 %

acquire the subscribers of Online Network Enterprises in
Boulder, CO in exchange for cash and common stock. The
industry is moving toward more efficient operations while
needing more money to market and develop new services
like web site hosting and, yes, telephony.

ISP owners and managers will have to consider the value of
their businesses more frequently. There will be buyout offers
(on some late nights they will sound pretty good). There will
be acquisition or merger opportunities.

In this column I will try to provide information to help
people answer that burning question: What is a reasonable
valuation?

There is no formula (yet). But there are trends.

ISPs of a certain size, with a certain subscriber base, in a cer¬
tain part of the ISP business, with a particular installed tech¬
nology may warrant certain valuations. My guess is most of
the future M&A activity will be done by “smart money.” These
investor are in for the long haul, not looking to flip a hot tech¬
nology stock in the public market. They will need to see a
return on their money commensurate with the risk they are
taking. Entrepreneurs will want to see the same. Join us here
each month to take a close look, too. ♦

Lan Rover
Access Switch

* Analog & ISDN call termination in one modular
solution

* High Capacity - designed for 100+ calls

* Radius support

* Remote Management

* Winner - Datacomm Magizine Testers Choice

AccessPort

* Single or multi user ISDN
personal router

* Wizard installation software for
easy configuration

* Monitoring software for
tracking usage

* Multi-Level security

Boardwatch - April 1997 59

WIRELESS

TJEvelopm^t

Steve Stroh learned
wireless TCP/IP net¬
working as an Amateur
Radio operator (call-
sign N8GNJ). He's
one of the founding
members of the Puget
Sound Amateur Radio
TCP/IP Group and is
Secretary for Tucson
Amateur Packet Radio
(TAPR), a national not-
for-profit Amateur
Radio Research
and Development
corporation that
specializes in wireless
digital communications.

Professionally, he’s a
NetWare and Windows
NT Administrator for a
large company. He’s
done battle with UNIX
a few too many times
and mostly lost, so
now he’s learning
Linux and BSDi in
preparation for his next
UNIX challenge. Steve
lives in Woodinville,
Washington (in the
shadow of Redmond)
with wife Tina and
daughter Merideth. He
can be reached at
strohs@halcyon.com.

by Steve Stroh

ireless Internet access, in its many forms, is
increasingly of interest to Internet service
providers. Many wireless digital products are intend¬
ed for markets such as wireless LANs and mobile e-
mail. This column will try to cover wireless data
developments as they relate to Boardwatch’s audi¬
ence of Internet service providers.

Is it practical to use wireless digital technologies to
provide Internet access? Yes! When you consider that
wireless digital technologies are being driven for¬
ward by the same forces as microprocessor technolo¬
gy, that answer is unsurprising. Most ISPs will
become involved with wireless digital in the next sev¬
eral years as it becomes more capable, easier to
implement, and less expensive. Your customers, and
your competition, will demand that you do so.

An excellent illustration of wireless digital’s promise
was AT&T’s February 25th announcement of the
development of practical wireless replacement for
the conventional telephone distribution system
based on copper cabling. AT&T Wireless and AT&T
Labs developed this system, whose development
name was Project Angel, as a way to provide local
telephone service without having to build its own
cable infrastructure to the home or pay rent to estab¬
lished telcos for the use of copper and fiber lines.

There is much to admire about AT&T’s fixed wireless
telephone system. One of its most surprising aspects
was that it was developed in relative secrecy in
Redmond, Washington. AT&T apparently developed
the system, which combines several digital modula¬
tion techniques — Time Division, Frequency
Division, and Space Division — to effectively service
thousands of users in the 10 MHz of spectrum that
AT&T obtained. The secrecy enabled AT&T to bid
relatively reasonable prices in the recent spectrum

auctions, obtaining allocations sufficient to cover
93% of the U.S. population.

AT&T’s system relies on base stations that could ser¬
vice between 1,000 and 2,000 fixed wireless tele¬
phone users. The base stations will often be the same,
existing base stations that service AT&T’s mobile cel¬
lular telephone customers. AT&T has reserved space
for the fixed wireless telephone equipment at its base
stations for the past two years, and a relatively small
30-inch semi-circular antenna needs to be added to
the antenna systems. The base stations are then con¬
nected to conventional telephone switching centers
via fiber optic lines.

At the residence, a “transceiver the size of a medium¬
shaped pizza box” (18 inches square) is mounted on
the side or rear of the home, and the internal tele¬
phone wiring is then routed to the transceiver. Since
the home’s phones would no longer be powered by the
central office, a battery backup unit “about half the
size of a desktop computer” can be installed. AT&T’s
fixed wireless telephone system provides at least 2
telephone “lines,” and Internet service at a minimum
of 128 Kbps. Left unsaid is how a computer in the
home is connected to the transceiver — additional
lObaseT wiring between the transceiver and comput¬
er is probably required. Transmissions between the
base station and the home transceiver are encrypted.
The system could include the ability to use the same
wireless phone as a cordless phone (usage charged at
“home” rates) or a mobile phone (usage charged at
“mobile” rates). Also left unsaid is the probability
that the Internet services will be “always connected.”
When there is no traffic, no “resources” are being con¬
sumed (unlike with a conventional modem connec¬
tion which ties up the circuit from home to central
office to ISP even if no data is being transferred at a
given moment). There is also the possibility of adding
a higher speed Internet connection (downlink only)
by using DirecPC, the satellite-based Internet ser-

Boardwatch - April 1997

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business in the most out-of-the-way places. This Internet Access platform pools the resources of a frame relay
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vice from Hughes Electronics. DirecPC
can transfer data from the Internet to
the user at 400 Kbps, but requires a con¬
ventional Internet connection to trans¬
mit data from the user to the Internet.
DirecPC technology could also be used
in terrestrial systems.

Formal testing of AT&T’s fixed wireless
telephone system will be conducted in
Chicago in 1997, initially with AT&T
employees, and later with the public.
Those tests will help determine what
the pricing of the system and service
will be. Components for the system are
already being manufactured at AT&T’s
Redmond facilities, where the system
was developed. Future enhancements
may include faster Internet access and
full-motion video conferencing.

AT&T’s fixed wireless telephone sys¬
tem has enormous potential. The sav¬
ings in labor and maintenance costs
alone could be enough to give AT&T a
decisive advantage in pricing local
telephone service against telcos using
copper cable, which is easily damaged
by backhoes, falling trees, and water
infiltration. Furthermore, copper cable
offers limited bandwidth for Internet

connections. Copper cabling must also
be maintained by skilled, expensive
technicians. AT&T’s fixed wireless
telephone system could easily be
upgraded to incorporate new technolo¬
gies such as faster Internet service
and full motion video conferencing by
downloading new code into non¬
volatile memory, or at worst, swapping
out the transceiver.

AT&T can even avoid investing in
labor to service the “last remaining
copper” — that of the telephone wiring
installed in the home. It has long been
established that the homeowner is
responsible for telephone wiring past
the demarcation point, which in this
case would be the transceiver. AT&T
could easily contract out the installa¬
tion and maintenance of the trans¬
ceivers and the home telephone wiring,
or customers could choose their own
telephone contractors. (This would
finally realize Jack Rickard’s long-held
dream of the “Rusty Pliers, one-man-
and-his-truck telephone company”)

The cost savings of AT&T’s fixed wire¬
less telephone system would not just be
on AT&T’s side. The customer would

benefit from AT&T being able to offer
bundled, lower-cost services such as
“additional” fixed telephone lines,
Internet services, cellular/mobile ser¬
vices, video conferencing, etc. AT&T’s
ability to bundle these services (and do
so with inherent efficiencies, unlike
other bundling arrangements where
multiple services are merely combined
onto one bill) should generate some com¬
pelling cost savings.

Will AT&T actually deploy this system?
I, for one, hope so. My home, which is not
too far from Redmond, is subject to all
the typical problems of suburban copper
telephone cabling — low speeds, service
outages during storms (lots of big trees),
and my current telco’s general lack of
willingness to do much about facilitat¬
ing affordable ISDN or faster Internet
connections. The AT&T fixed wireless
telephone system seems ideally suited
for fast growing (profitable) suburban
areas, but less well suited for densely
populated urban areas.

For more information, see AT&T’s press
release at www.att.com/press/0297
/970225.pca.html>

62 Boardwatch - April 1997

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64 Boardwatch - April 1997

water (much like a dehumidifier). This is
a great feature that will prevent a flood
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Boardwatch - April 1997 65

LEGAL

j issues

SYSTEM OPERATOR
LIABILITY:

WHAT HAVE WE LEARNED?

by Eric Schlachter, Esq, Cooley Godward LLP

Eric Schlachter is an
attorney practicing in
cyberspace law with
the Silicon Valley firm
of Cooley Godward
LLP. He is also an
adjunct professor of
Cyberspace Law at
the Santa Clara
University School of
Law. He can be
reached at
schlachtere®
cooley.com.

I n the early 1980s,
Thomas Tcimpidis
operated a bulletin
board system in Los
Angeles. In 1984,
Tcimpidis was arrest-
ed because a user had
posted stolen tele¬
phone credit card numbers onto the BBS and
Tcimpidis was charged with the misdemeanor of
“knowingly and willfully” publishing the stolen
numbers. Although the charges were eventually
dropped, his arrest received national press cover¬
age and drew attention to the potential liabilities
faced by sysops for the actions of their users.
Some sysops chose to shut down their system
rather than face this liability.

We now have accumulated 13 years of experience
regarding the issues faced by sysops for the con¬
tent they make available on their system. As we
might expect, many issues have been clarified in
the intervening time, while many other issues
have remain unresolved. Although there are
many interesting issues related to sysop liability
for their own actions and statements, the more
difficult and complicated issues arise with respect
to the liability faced by sysops, including
Tcimpidis, for the activities and content of their
users. Few sysops fully appreciate the extent of
their liability for their users’ or content provider’s
activities. This article focuses on some of the con¬
clusions reached—and issues remaining—with
respect to sysop liability for the statements and
actions of third parties.

LIABILITY FOR THIRD PARTY ACTIONS
AND CONTENT IS NOT UNPRECEDENTED

• There are numerous situations where the
principle of “vicarious liability” applies.
Vicarious liability means that one party,
regardless of conduct or intent, is liable for
third party conduct. For example, an employ¬
er is vicariously liable for its employees’ con¬
duct performed in the course of employment.
Therefore, if an employee is required by his or
her job to drive a truck, and the employee
causes personal injuries to a pedestrian, the
employer will be liable for such injuries even
if the employer did nothing wrong. Similarly,
partners in a partnership are vicariously
liable for all partners’ actions performed in
the course of the partnership.

• Parents can be liable for the conduct of their
children. Sometimes liability does not accrue
unless the parents were negligent in supervis¬
ing their children; however, there are circum
stances where the parent will be liable even
if they were not negligent.

• Property owners may be liable for the envi¬
ronmental problems on their property, even if
the problems were caused by a prior owner.

• Closer to the sysop situation, newspapers and
other “publishers” are liable for the content
they publish, even if the content is provided
by third parties. Therefore, if a newspaper
publishes an article written by a free lance
journalist or a news wire service, the news¬
paper ordinarily will be liable for the harm ere
ated from the article (as discussed above, if
the article were written by a staff reporter, the
newspaper would have been vicariously liable).

It is often assumed that sysop liability for a third
party’s actions is somehow unique or unprece¬
dented. In fact, there are a wide variety of legal
situations where one party shares liability for a
third party’s actions, many times without any
wrongdoing on the part of the non-acting party.

The following illustrate some situations where a
party is liable for the statements or actions of
third parties:

Also, copyright law is a “strict liability tort,”
meaning that intent to violate is not a prerequi¬
site to infringement. Therefore, film processors
have been found liable for copyright infringe¬
ment merely by processing rolls of film delivered
by customers. Furthermore, there is a vicarious
liability doctrine in copyright law which has
held the proprietors of “dance halls” vicariously
liable for the copyright infringements commit¬
ted by bands that play at the venue.

66 Boardwatch - April 1997

The above list is certainly not com¬
plete, but it illustrates the principle
that there are many existing situations
in a wide variety of legal doctrines
where third parties can create liability
for another. Therefore, perhaps sysop
liability for third party actions and
statements is not unprecedented. Of
course, concluding that such sysop lia¬
bility is a good thing is a different con¬
clusion altogether.

The body of law relating to sysop liability
continues to grow in an ad hoc fashion as
cases in various disciplines are decided
without cross-reference or integrating
analysis. Therefore, this section discusses
cases on sysop liability for copyright,
defamation and obscenity/pomography. A
brief mention of trademarks is also made.

There have been three United States
cases reported on the issue of sysop lia¬
bility for copyright infringement com¬
mitted by their users.

Playboy v. Frena, a 1993 case from a
federal court in Florida, involved a situa¬
tion where photos from Playboy had been
scanned, digitized and uploaded to a bul¬
letin board system in Florida called Techs
Warehouse. George Frena, the sysop of
Techs Warehouse, was sued by Playboy
for copyright infrin gement ;and

mark infringemeiaj| ^^^^^^^^^ ..

and unfair competlB
tion, but these claims
will not be discusse®
in this article).

Playboy moved fof
summary judgmeiJH
in its favor, which,
the court can grant if
there are no mater®
al issues of fact ia
dispute. Fren||
argued that there
was a material issue
in dispute, since he
claimed that his users were responsible
for uploading the digitized photos to the
system (although in the court’s discus¬
sion of trademark infringement, the
court seems to believe that Frena him¬
self had uploaded the photos—although
the court was not permitted to make
this factual determination in response
to a summary judgment motion).

The court granted Playboy’s motion for
summary judgment, concluding that
whether Frena or his users had
uploaded the files was irrelevant. The
court concluded that Frena violated
Playboy’s right of “distribution,” argu¬

ing that “[t]here is no dispute that
Defendant Frena supplied a product
containing unauthorized copies of a
copyrighted work. It does not matter
that Defendant Frena claims he did
not make the copies itself.” In thinly
worded analysis, the court also con¬
cluded that Frena violated Playboy’s
right of “public display.”

The court concluded its analysis by
reiterating why Frena’s assertion that
he did not load the files was irrelevant:
“There is irrefutable evidence of direct
copyright infringement in this case. It
does not matter that Defendant Frena
may have been unaware of the copy¬
right infringement. Intent to infringe
is not needed to find copyright
infringement. Intent or knowledge is
not an element of infringement, and
thus even an innocent infringer is
liable for infringement....”

Sega v. MAPHIA, a case from a federal
court in Northern California, was ini¬
tially decided in March 1994, closely
after the Frena case. (A subsequent deci¬
sion is discussed below; the initial deci¬
sion is referred to as Sega I). In the Sega
case, the defendants ran a bulletin
board system called MAPHIA. Users of
the MAPHIA BBS were able to get Sega
game software which had been removed
from the game cartridges and uploaded
to the BBS. The defendants also sold
“back up units”
designed to allow
users to copy Sega
game cartridges.
In connection
with sales of such
units, or on a
standalone basis,
defendants would
permit buyers to
download Sega
games from the
BBS. The defen¬
dants would also
allow those who
uploaded Sega
games to the BBS the right to download
other games.

The Sega I court found that the games
had been uploaded to the BBS by users.
The court made no conclusion that the
sysops/defendants had uploaded the
infringing material. Nevertheless, as in
the Frena case, the Sega I court con¬
cluded that the defendants had directly
infringed Sega’s copyrights.

The Sega I court further concluded that
MAPHIA had contributorily infringed
Sega’s copyrights. A contributory
infringer is “one who, with knowledge

“The CD A,
roundly criticized
as a horrendous
law , seems tb
absolve sysops for
many types of
liability 99

of the infringing conduct of another,
induces, causes or materially con¬
tributes to the infringing conduct of
another.” The defendants could proper¬
ly be deemed contributory infringers
because they had actively promoted the
BBS as an exchange of copyrighted
material and had encouraged it
through selling and bartering the
rights to make downloads.

The Frena and Sega I conclusion—that
sysops are directly liable for copyright
infringement by their users—has pro¬
duced widespread criticism, but some pol¬
icy makers have endorsed the result. The
Clinton Administration appointed a task
force to examine copyright issues in
cyberspace, and in a 1995 “White Paper,”
the task force endorsed direct liability for
sysops. Some discussions have heen had
within Congress to implement this
endorsement legislatively. Also, at the
World Intellectual Property Organization
meetings in December 1996 in Geneva, a
worldwide treaty was proposed (and
rejected) that would make sysops directly
liable for copyright infringement.

In December 1996, the Sega court ren¬
dered a second ruling that clarified the
first ruling. Based in part on the Netcom
decision (discussed in the next para¬
graph), the Sega II court concluded that
since the sysop did not upload the
games to the BBS, he was not directly
liable for copyright infringement.
However, due to his encouragement of
unauthorized uploads and participation
in the general scheme, he was found
contributorily liable.

The third case involving sysop liability
for copyright infringement is Religious
Technology Center v. Netcom, an
opinion issued by a federal court in
Northern California. The Netcom case
involved potential liability for an
infringing USENET posting made by a
user. The user, Dennis Erlich, was a sub¬
scriber of a North Hollywood BBS called
Support.com operated by defendant Tom
Klemesrud, who used Netcom as the
BBS’s Internet service provider.

Erlich posted a message containing the
copyrighted material of the Religious
Technology Center, which is an entity
associated with the Church of
Scientology. The message was sent by
Klemesrud’s BBS to Netcom’s servers,
which forwarded the message on to
other USENET servers and made the
posting available to Netcom’s sub¬
scribers. Plaintiffs contacted the defen¬
dants and asked them to take various
steps, including the removal of the post¬
ing from the USENET servers. Most of

Boardwatch - April 1997 67

the plaintiff’s requests were denied, and
Erlich’s posting remained on Netcom’s
USENET server until it was deleted in
the ordinary course of purging old
USENET postings 11 days later.

The Religious Technology Center sued
Erlich, Klemesrud and Netcom under a
number of theories, including copy¬
right infringement. In an opinion
issued in late 1995, the court dealt
with Netcom’s and Klemesrud’s liabili¬
ty for copyright infringement.

The court found that Netcom and
Klemesrud were not liable for direct
infringement of the Scientology texts by
forwarding the work to other USENET
servers and by displaying the work to
USENET readers on their services.
Although their servers made copies of
the materials, neither Netcom nor
Klemesrud had done nothing volitional-
ly: “Only the subscriber should be liable
for causing the distribution of plaintiff’s
work, as the contributing actions of the
BBS provider are automatic and indis¬
criminate.” Further, if the court did find
Netcom or Klemesrud liable as a direct
infringer, then USENET would neces¬
sarily be shut down because each server
would be directly infringing—a result
the court did not think was necessary:
“The court does not find workable a the¬
ory of infringement that would find the
entire Internet liable for activities that
cannot reasonably be deterred.”

In refusing to hold Netcom and
Klemesrud directly liable for copyright
infringement, the Netcom court declined
to follow the results reached in Frena
and Sega I holding the sysops directly
liable for their users’ actions.

With respect to contributory infringe¬
ment, the court noted that Netcom and
Klemesrud were given notice of the exis¬
tence of infringing material before the
posting was automatically flushed. As a
matter of law, the court concluded that
“[w]here a [sysop] cannot reasonably
verify a claim of infringement, either
because of a possible fair use defense,
the lack of copyright notices on the copy,
or the copyright holder’s failure to pro¬
vide the necessary documentation to
show that there is a likely infringement,
the operator’s lack of knowledge will be
found reasonable and there will be no
liability for contributory infringement
for allowing the continued distribution
of the works on its system.” By implica¬
tion, therefore, if the sysop receives a
valid and adequate notice of copyright
infringement occurring on its servers
and fails to act, the sysop could be con-
tributorily liable. The court reserved the

issue of whether or not Netcom and
Klemesrud had sufficient notice for fur¬
ther argument by the parties.

The court also addressed whether
Netcom should be “vicariously” liable for
Erlich’s behavior. In copyright law, vic¬
arious liability accrues when a party
has sufficient “right and ability to con¬
trol” behavior and receives a direct
financial benefit from the behavior.
Although the court could not make a
factual determination about Netcom’s
right and ability to control Erlich, the
court found that Netcom did not direct¬
ly benefit financially from Erlich and
therefore was not liable. (Klemesrud’s
vicarious liability was not thoroughly
addressed because of a procedural error
made by the plaintiffs.)

Finally, the Netcom court addressed
whether Netcom’s behavior was excus¬
able under the “fair use” defense. “Fair
use” is a defense to claims of infringe¬
ment and can be found by analyzing
four factors: the purpose and character
of the use, the nature of copyrighted
work, the amount and substantiality of
the portion taken, and the effect of the
use on the potential market for the work
(all four factors are considered, although
the last is considered the most impor¬
tant). Although Netcom did copy the
entire work in some cases, the court
noted that Netcom only copied the
amount of the work necessary to act as
a USENET node. The court reserved as
a factual matter whether or not
Netcom’s use was fair.

The Netcom case was a well-reasoned
case and it tells us a lot about the lat¬
est thinking on sysop liability for copy¬
right infringement. Although the case
was not a clear victory for Netcom or
Klemesrud, it is fairly clear that they
were unlikely to face liability for act¬
ing as a USENET node. However,
Netcom and Klemesrud were poten¬
tially subject to liability because they
were informed that their system con¬
tained infringing material and they
failed to act. Even in this case, the
court seemed sympathetic to Netcom’s
argument that it should not be forced
to remove infringing material just
because it receives an unsupported
assertion that the material infringes.
Therefore, unlike the Frena and Sega I
cases, which effectively held sysops
strictly liable for any copyright
infringement on their systems, the
Netcom court established some mean¬
ingful thresholds on possible sysop lia¬
bility. For better or worse, we will
never know how the Netcom court
would finally resolve the issues. In the

Fall of 1996 Klemesrud settled for
$50,000 and Netcom settled under a
cloak of confidentiality.

Finally, an international copyright case is
worth mentioning. In the case
Scientology v. Providers, a decision ren¬
dered by the District Court of the Hague
in March 1996, the Church of Scientology
sued 22 Internet service providers (ISPs)
and one Internet user (who had a home
page containing Church of Scientology
material) for copyright infringement and
trade secret misappropriation, seeking
an injunction against further infringe¬
ment. The claim against the user failed
because the user had already modified
her page to delete some materials and
had retained only those materials that
had been published before (and therefore
were not trade secrets), and the remain¬
der were subject to the Danish equiva¬
lent of fair use. As for the ISPs, the court
concluded that the ISPs had no knowl¬
edge of what their users do and no abili¬
ty to influence such actions. Therefore,
“there is no reason to hold them respon¬
sible for wrongful acts of users, e.g., copy¬
right infringements by third parties.”
However, the court might have reached a
different result if the ISP knew of the
users’ actions and further knew they
were unequivocally wrongful.

DEFAMATION

There have been two reported cases in
the United States that have addressed
sysop liability for defamation.

The first case is Cubby v. Compu¬
Serve, a 1991 decision from the Federal
district court in New York City. In this
case, CompuServe, an international
online service, contracted with Cameron
Communications for Cameron to man¬
age CompuServe’s Journalism Forum.
Cameron in turn contracted with Don
Fitzpatrick Associates for Fitzpatrick to
supply its periodical Rumorville USA to
the Journalism Forum. In addition to
being CompuServe subscribers, Rumor¬
ville readers had to contract with
Fitzpatrick for the right to read the peri¬
odical. CompuServe’s only compensation
related to Rumorville was for the time
its users spent online reading
Rumorville. It received no share of the
subscriptions paid to Fitzpatrick nor
made a separate subscription or access
fee charge to readers.

In 1990, Rumorville USA published some
statements that the plaintiffs alleged
were defamatory, and the plaintiffs sued
CompuServe and Fitzpatrick for libel,
business disparagement and unfair com¬
petition. In the case, CompuServe asked

68 Boardwatch - April 1997

for the court to dismiss CompuServe from
further proceedings.

At issue is whether CompuServe was a
“publisher” of Rumorville or a “distribu¬
tor” of Rumorville. The law accords spe¬
cial protection to distributors, because to
impose excessive liability on them would
force them to review all content they dis¬
tribute, which is an impermissibly heavy
burden under the First Amendment. The
court concluded that “CompuServe ... is
in essence an electronic, for-profit library
...” and noted that once CompuServe (or,
in this case, its independent contractor)
decides to carry a publication, it will
exercise little editorial control over the
contents of that publication.

Therefore, CompuServe could be liable
for the contents of Rumorville only if it
knew or had reason to know of the
allegedly defamatory statements. Since
CompuServe did not review the con¬
tents of Rumorville before it was pub¬
lished, and did not otherwise have any
reason to know of defamatory state¬
ments in Rumorville, CompuServe was
not liable for Rumorville’s statements.
The court also rejected vicarious liabili¬
ty on CompuServe’s part for the actions
of Cameron and Fitzpatrick, noting that
CompuServe had delegated manage¬

ment of the Journalism Forum to
Cameron. The court rejected arguments
that CompuServe’s requirement that
Cameron manage the forum in accor¬
dance with CompuServe’s standards,
CompuServe’s training of Cameron and
the indemnity from CompuServe to
Cameron were sufficient to give
CompuServe control over Cameron.

For many years lawyers and industry
members believed that the Cubby case
was the definitive statement regard¬
ing sysop liability for the statements
or actions of its users. Indeed, until
the Frena case, Cubby was the only
reported case on the subject. Further¬
more, the standard articulated in
Cubby— that CompuServe was liable
only if it knew or had reason to know
of the allegedly defamatory state¬
ment-provided a reasonably well-
defined, relatively high threshold for
insulating sysops from liability.

Thus, the industry received a rude
shock from Stratton Oakmont v.
Prodigy, a decision handed down by the
New York Supreme Court (the lowest
court in New York) in May 1995. The
case involved postings to Prodigy’s
Money Talk forum that allegedly
defamed Stratton Oakmont and its

president. These postings were made
from an inactive account held by a for¬
mer employee, and therefore the poster
was effectively anonymous. Again, the
issue was whether Prodigy was a “pub¬
lisher” of the statements and therefore
subject to a higher standards of poten¬
tial liability for defamation.

Throughout the early 1990s, Prodigy
had aggressively marketed itself as
the family-oriented online service. In
particular, Prodigy had claimed to
exercise editorial control over its con¬
tent and had repeatedly analogized
itself to a newspaper. To accomplish
its objectives, at one time Prodigy
had deployed dozens of employees to
prescreen and review every public
posting. Prodigy also used a number
of techniques to control the content
made publicly available on its ser¬
vice: using software that pre¬
screened for a proscribed list of
words; promulgating user guide¬
lines which prohibited messages
that were insulting, repugnant to
the community, or harmful to a har¬
monious community; using “Board
Leaders” to enforce these guide¬
lines; and making available techni¬
cal tools for Board Leaders to delete
offensive messages.

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The court concluded that Prodigy was a
publisher as a matter of law, and there¬
fore subject to liability for defamation as
a publisher, for two primary reasons.
First, Prodigy had held itself out as
exercising editorial control. Second, the
use of prescreening software and Board
Leaders to enforce subjective guidelines
meant that Prodigy was making deci¬
sions about content.

Furthermore, the court held that the
Money Talk forum’s Board Leader was an
agent of Prodigy, and therefore Prodigy
was vicariously liable for the Board
Leader’s actions. Despite rather clear lan¬
guage in Prodigy’s agreement with the
Board Leaders disclaiming an agency
relationship, the court found that by
requiring the Board Leaders to enforce
Prodigy’s guidelines and by requiring
Board Leaders to seek guidance from
Prodigy, Prodigy had “managed” the
Board Leaders such that they were con¬
sidered agents as a matter of law.

The Stratton Oakmont case was widely
criticized when it was issued, in part
because of the sweeping implications of
the court’s ruling and in part because of
its inability to be easily reconciled with
the Cubby case. Indeed, by 1994 (the
time of the postings at issue in Stratton
Oakmont), Prodigy was no longer
attempting to control the content on its
system in a meaningfully different way
than was AOL or CompuServe.
However, there is no doubt that the
Stratton Oak-mont result can be
explained in part by Prodigy’s very public
assertions in the early 1990s about its
exercise of editorial control—assertions

that came back to haunt Prodigy
(although the case ultimately settled
without Prodigy having to pay any money
to Stratton Oakmont).

As discussed below, the Stratton
Oakmont case may no longer be good law.
However, a few lessons can still be
learned from it. First, any marketing
campaign must be carefully considered
in the context of the legal environment in
which the company operates. Prodigy
may very well have been able to persuade
the judge to follow the Cubby reasoning if
Prodigy did not have all of its declara¬
tions from years past to explain away.
Second, although manipulation of user
content is necessarily required in the
process of making it publicly available,
the more manipula tion performed, the
more than a techni
logically-challengejl
judge might conside
it to be a form of ed
torial control. There
fore, despite the man
advantages to aufr
matic word filter!
these filters can sup
port a claim of editoi
ial control and there
fore should be usei
advisedly. Third,
agreements regard®
ing the posting of con®
tent should be drafted
extremely carefully, so that “subjective”
standards are minimized. Typically, a
clause requiring users not to make any
illegal postings is sufficient to restrict
most noxious conduct—without creating
the opportunity for the sysop to be per¬
ceived as applying “subjective” standards
that look like editorial control.

OBSCENITY AND PORNOGRAPHY

Although there have been many cases
involving sysop liability for obscene or
pornographic material, none of these
cases have involved sysop liability for
user postings.

However, the Communications Decency
Act (CDA), a portion of the Telecommu¬
nications Act of 1996, deals squarely
with sysop liability for “indecent” post¬
ings by their users. Gen-erally, the CDA
prohibits users from knowingly sending
content that is “obscene, lewd, lascivi¬
ous, filthy or indecent, with intent to
annoy, abuse, threaten or harass” anoth¬
er person or sending content that is
obscene or indecent knowing that the
recipient is under 18. The CDA also pro¬
hibits knowingly sending or displaying
content to persons under 18 any content
that, in context, depicts or describes, in

terms patently offensive as measured by
contemporary community standards,
sexual or excretory activities or organs.

In both cases, individuals who knowing¬
ly permit any “telecommunications facil¬
ity” under their control to be used for
such activities, with the intent that the
facilities be used for such activities, are
also liable.

There are many defenses described in the
CDA, and mapping out the contours of
these defenses is beyond the scope of this
paper. However, in many cases such
analysis is currently moot—almost all of
the operative provisions of the CDA have
been enjoined in the much-heralded case
ACLU v. Reno. The ACLU case is current¬
ly pending before the U.S. Supreme
Court, and a ruling
ft expected in mid-
1997.

Nevertheless, one
defense enumerated
in the CDA is partic¬
ularly important:
“No provider or user
of an interactive
computer service
shall be treated as
the publisher or
speaker of any infor¬
mation provided by
another information
content provider.”
The legislative history on this provision
says “[o]ne of the specific purposes of this
section is to overrule Stratton Oakmont v.
Prodigy and any other similar decisions
which have treated such providers as pub¬
lishers or speakers of content that is not
their own because they have restricted
access to objectionable material.”

This section raises as many questions as
it answers. On its face, it appears to
negate many forms of sysop liability for
third party actions or statements,
resolving many of the ambiguities dis¬
cussed in this paper. On the other hand,
there are several questions:

Will courts give effect to this provision if
the remainder of the operative provi¬
sions of the CDA are permanently
struck down as unconstitutional?

Will courts give effect to this provision if
the sysop is not trying to restrict access
to objectionable materials but is merely
exercising a more general form of edito¬
rial control?

Will this language be extended to cover
sysop liability for copyright infringe¬
ment, which does not use the term “pub¬
lisher” or “speaker” but instead uses the

“A clause
requiring users
not to make any
illegal postings is
sufficient /a
restrict most
noxious -
conduct 99

70 Boardwatch - April 1997

terms “reproduce,” “distribute,” and
“publicly display”?

TRADEMARKS

The Frena and Sega cases both
addressed sysop liability for trademark
infringement. However, in both cases the
sysop was the party taking the actions
resulting in trademark in-fringement. In
Fre-na’s case, Frena had inserted his own
proprietary rights no-tices into the GIFs;
in the Sega case, the sysop had developed
file descriptions and hierarchies which
used Sega’s trademarks. Therefore, these
cases contribute little to our understand¬
ing of sysop liability for third party trade¬
mark infringement.

However, a decision somewhat relevant to
this topic was reached in Panavision v.
Toeppen in a decision reached in No¬
vember 1996 in a federal district court in
Los Angeles. In the case, the domain
name registry Network Solutions, Inc.
(NSI) was sued for negligent interference
with prospective economic advantage for
giving the domain names panavision.com
and panaflex.com (both of which are reg¬
istered trademarks owned by Pana¬
vision) to Dennis Toeppen, a notorious
domain name hijacker. The tort of for neg¬
ligent interference with prospective eco¬

nomic advantage is a relatively nebulous
one and therefore courts are reluctant to
extend liability too far—defendants must
have a “special relationship” with plain¬
tiffs in order to be liable. The Panavision
court ruled that such a special relation¬
ship did not exist between NSI and
Panavision. NSI did not know that
Toeppen’s actions were intended to inter¬
fere with Panavision’s rights, and “NSI is
under no general duty to investigate
whether a given registration is improp¬
er.” Although this language is context-
specific to the general duties of reg¬
istries for negligent interference with
prospective economic advantage, the
reasoning of the case might apply to
insulate sysops for trademark infringe¬
ments committed by their users.

SO WHAT HAVE WE LEARNED?

There are no clear trends about whether
or not we really want sysops to act as
the guarantor for the harms caused by
their users. The Frena, Sega I and
Stratton Oakmont cases very liberally
imposed liability on sysops. Other cases,
such as Netcom and Cubby, have im¬
posed significant hurdles on finding
sysops liable. The legislative trends
have been no more clear. The rumblings
made in congress and at the WIPO con¬

ference toward increased sysop liability
are ominous. But the CDA, roundly crit¬
icized as a horrendous law, seems to
absolve sysops for many types of liability.

In the midst of the confusion, however,
one phrase comes up repeatedly: Did the
sysop “know or have reason to know” of
the harmful conduct? This standard
requires that the sysop had actual
knowledge or deliberately ignored the
problem before imposing liability on the
sysop. On the other hand, it does give
harmed third parties, like copyright
owners or defamed parties, the opportu¬
nity to limit their harm by forcing action
when the sysop is informed of a prob¬
lem. This solution avoids a legal regime
of liability so chilling as to drive sysops
out of the business, without permitting
anarchy to reign on the Internet.

Nevertheless, there is no promise that
the rules to be developed regarding
sysop liability will strike any balance at
all. As more cases are decided by judges
who do not understand the technology,
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Boardwatch - April 1997 71

Convergence or Collision:
Telecommunications Regulation
and the Internet

The following comments were delivered
by Reed Hundt, Chairman of the Fed¬
eral Communications Commission on
March 7,1977 at the University of Cali¬
fornia, Berkeley.

P resident Kennedy won the applause
of millions when he went to
Germany and said in front of that Wall
which has now tumbled down: Ich bin
ein Berliner.

What can I say to win the approval of the
economists who organized the conference
today? Ich bin ein economist won’t work.
The truth is I am a lawyer; in fact it’s
worse than that, I’m a son of a lawyer. I
am not, regrettably, an economist.

I can say that I hired two Berkeley
economists as Chief Economists at the
FCC, and that under our first and bril¬
liant occupant of that seat in my
tenure Mike Katz and under the lead¬
ership of his equally able and equally
energetic successor Joe Farrell we
have tripled the number of economists
at the agency.

I can say that my motto on day one,
memorialized on T-shirts at our first
retreat, was “Read the law, study the eco¬
nomics, and do the right thing.” I hope
the economists forgive that part about
the law.

I can say that I have a pitbull, I’ve
named it Long Run Incremental Cost,
and I’ve let little LRIC chew on all the
other historic dogs in the neighborhood.

This would be true if I had a dog, but
those of you who are economists can
assume a dog.

I’ve had my current job for three-and-
one-half funfilled and exciting years. In
my term the Internet has exploded into
consciousness; the hardware and soft¬
ware business in the U.S. has more or
less tripled in market cap; the country
has decided that every child should have
public access to communications technol¬

ogy; millions of new information-sector
jobs have been created in the U.S., and
the entire world has agreed in the World
Trade Organization to reject the old way
of monopoly in the communications sec¬
tor and adopt the American paradigm of
competition to build the global informa¬
tion highway.

I could take credit for all that. In my
memoirs I shall.

But for now let me say that economists
deserve all the credit. Earlier this week I
told the cellular telephone association,
Wired Magazine, and the Association for
Computing Machinery each that they
deserved all the credit.

This is called speaker’s license.

Speaking of license, I read in the Wall
Street Journal yesterday (as Mort Sahl
said, I get it every day, packed in ice) that
economists have given the Adminis¬
tration a B minus grade. Who knows
what they would say if we hadn’t had
steady economic growth, huge wealth cre¬
ation in the stock market, and historic
progress toward a balanced budget.
These successes are attributable in large
part to sound economic advice in the halls
of government. Brilliant economists like
Joe Farrell, Joe Stiglitz, Janet Yellen, and
Larry Summers play key policy roles.
Others like Laura Tyson, Alan Blinder,
Carl Shapiro and Rich Gilbert shaped the
essential decisions of the first term of
President Clinton’s administration.

It was economists and their way of
approaching issues that lay behind the
highly difficult and politically coura¬
geous decisions like supporting NAFTA,
twice defeating the Balanced Budget
Amendment, striking the ITA and Basic
Telcom agreements in the WTO, passing
OBRA in 93, and, at the FCC, totally
overhauling spectrum policy and open¬
ing up the local exchange market to
bypass or sharing by rivals.

Reed Hundt, Chairman,
Federal Communications
Commission

Economists chronically fail to answer
such pressing questions as how best to
improve economic growth or reduce wage
disparity or predict the future. But these
are very forgivable failings and are in no
way fatal to the utility of the discipline.

In my job I find that economists help us
more than any other experts to define
policy goals in measurable ways, identify
illogical reasoning, focus on the greater
good and not on the greater political
power, and routinely suggest new per¬
spectives and fresh ideas.

To use my time wisely today, therefore, I
have brought you some of the questions
before us.

First, what ought to be the purpose of
our FCC policies?

To make this exercise fit within the acad¬
emy’s protocols, I’m also going to give you

72 Boardwatch - April 1997

a range of answers. If you’ll just mark
down the correct choices on a scrap of
paper Mike Katz and Joe Farrell will col¬
lect them later, throw them away, and
tell me what they know we should do.

What is our purpose?

a. Optimize welfare gains.

b. Undo previous policy mistakes that
didn’t optimize welfare gains.

c. Redistribute wealth so as to increase
opportunities for all, especially children.

d. Favor competition over regulation of
monopolies, even if competition is
messy, somewhat inefficient, and
challenging to insist upon.

e. All of the above.

Second, what steps should we take to
assure that the existing telcom incum¬
bents’ networks are susceptible to
being bypassed or shared by new
entrants, yet at the same time are not
under-funded or under-innovated as a
result of pro-competition rules at the
federal or state level?

Answers:

a. Order that new facilities or services
developed by incumbents after a
future date certain should not be sub¬
ject to resale or sharing rules in our
justly famous Interconnection Order
unless five years pass.

b. Order that the second line to the
home or business be deregulated as
to price, and not be the recipient of
any subsidy.

c. Order that other than universal ser¬
vices such as basic dial tone, no other
retail phone service be rate regulated
by state or federal commissions.

d. Issue in April a Notice of Inquiry on
any and all innovation issues suggest¬
ed to us by anyone, make a record,
then proceed to rulemaking to be con¬
cluded not later than this fall.

e. All of the above.

Third, what if anything should we say or
do about the Internet?

a. Run and hide from the 320,000 e-mail
messages supporting the ESP exemp¬
tion that have already been sent to
the four commissioners. Never in the

course of human history have so
many said so much to so few.

b. Pretend that the Bells didn’t ask for
interstate access charges to be
imposed on ESPs.

c. Pretend that there aren’t any usage
costs generated by ESPs on the
PSTN.

d. All of the above.

Many of the local phone companies have
been urging us to allow them to assess
per-minute access charges on Internet
service providers. They claim that
Internet usage is clogging their networks.

The first task for the FCC should be fix¬
ing the access charge system. With
respect to the access charge system, the
current emerging view seems to be that
we should take a big first step to reduce
terminating charges and a somewhat
smaller first step to reduce originating

“Run and hide from the
320,000 e-mail messages
supporting the ESP
exemption that have
already been sent to the
four commissioners. Never
in the course of human
history have so many said
so much to so few.”

charges, commit to a predictable path
over a few years to reduce each toward
TSLRIC levels, flat-rate some but not
necessarily all the shortfall for the LECs
by way of a charge to IXCs, tilt that
charge somewhat toward the business
lines and away from residential, and
increase flat-rate charges on end users
as to multiple lines.

And we need to take steps to guarantee
resulting decreases in the prices for long
distance offered to those Americans who
have not otherwise benefited from the
price drops contained in various volume-
based discount plans. Even low-volume
users, and users too preoccupied or poor¬
ly informed to seek out a discount plan,
have demand elasticity, so even from a
pure efficiency point of view it’s bad that
they pay such high per-minute prices.

If the Commission takes these steps, it
will earn a very glorious place in telcom
history, since it is something like what

I’ve outlined that economists have been
urging on us for many, many years. If
we don’t, based on what you’ve told me
for several years now, we will deserve
your criticism and contumely for some
time to come.

But about Internet access charges I don’t
think we have the data or the good prac¬
tical ideas that beckon us toward clear
decisions on access reform generally.

For instance, we have surprisingly little
information about some critical empiri¬
cal questions. Exactly what are the costs
of network upgrades to support the
growth of Internet services? How would
different pricing regimes — for example,
charging some usage-sensitive rate to
ISPs — affect Internet usage patterns?
How much overall revenue do local
exchange carriers derive from Internet
usage, when you factor in things like sec¬
ond line growth?

As a former litigator, I find this perpetu¬
ally frustrating. In litigation, if you need
a piece of information, you subpoena it,
or depose under oath the person best
able to supply it, or find a consultant
who’s collected it and pay for the multi¬
thousand dollar report. At the FCC, it
seems we’re always being told “that’s
confidential information; we can’t tell
you,” or different parties tell us com¬
pletely contradictory things — not under
oath, I notice. It’s so bad that in our
recent wireless competition report, man¬
dated by Congress, we had to admit that
we have only anecdotal and second¬
hand evidence that prices fall when new
entrants come into the market! This is
pretty sad stuff; the academy could help
us enormously if it chose to do so.

In any event, we are being told just now
that the Internet and other new interac¬
tive services are sorely constrained by
the capillary telephone network we have
today. This could be true-ish, but already
Nortel, Lucent, DSC, and other equip¬
ment manufacturers have announced
products to redirect Internet service
provider traffic away from circuit switch¬
es and onto packet-based data networks.

At our bandwidth forum in late January,
Hughes demonstrated their DirectPC
service that provides 400 kilobits per
second Internet access to the home, and
we also saw a wireless MMDS service
that provided 1.5 megabits per second.

Meanwhile, AT&T just announced their
own digital wireless local loop technology,
which they say will provide up to 128

Boardwatch - April 1997 73

kilobit per second connections. Microsoft
rocked the CTIA convention this week by
suggesting that wireless companies are
not doing enough to promote Internet
access; our policies can at least open the
door for a response. Specifically, we can
do more to facilitate cell siting, guarantee
flexible spectrum use, reduce intercon¬
nection charges, and attract investment.

And MFS is buying unbundled loops
from local phone companies, connecting
those loops to their own equipment, and
providing data rates as high as 764 kilo¬
bits per second. Future xDSL implemen¬
tations promise as much as six megabits
per second over ordinary copper phone
fines, over 200 times as fast as the cur¬
rent generation of analog modems. xDSL
may be the gateway to the construction
of a ubiquitous, nationwide, unswitched,
packet-based service. If not that technol¬
ogy, some other may be the solution to
congestion in the circuit-switched net¬
work. I just don’t think the FCC knows
enough at this time to alter the current
ESP exemption.

But I do think we know one important
thing: Our best bet for promoting
Internet solutions will be our overall
competition policy.

The Telecommunications Act of 1996
should really be called the Big Band¬
width Act, because that’s what it will
mean if we do our job right.

To have big bandwidth networks, we will
need to see the kind of competition that
characterizes, for example, the pizza
delivery business. Like pizza, bandwidth
will be delivered piping hot to your door,
in small, medium, or large size. You’ll be
able to get anything you want on it—
voice, video, or data, in any combination.

No one thinks that pizzas are best deliv¬
ered by a single monopoly, subject to the
control of the Federal Pizza Commission.
No one should think that personalized
home or business bandwidth needs are
best served by the old regime of regulat¬
ed monopoly.

So let’s have the FCC and the states
aggressively enforce the three rights of
competition: resale, interconnection, and
unbundling.

Meanwhile, let’s have the FCC and the
states aggressively deregulate certain
service. For instance, ISDN has been
available for more than a decade, and it
provides eight times the bandwidth of
current analog modems. Yet there are
still less than a million ISDN fines
installed in the entire country. Mean¬
while, state commissions are regulating

the price of ISDN; could this situation
resemble state regulation of cellular,
which appears to have reduced competi¬
tion in cellular pricing? This could be
studied; test cases abound. According to
the Consumer Project on Technology, 200
hours of ISDN usage costs $45 per month
in Wisconsin and $505 per month in
Indiana. Here in California, the same
level of usage costs about $95 per month.

Perhaps there is a right regulated price;
or perhaps states should simply get out
of the business of regulating rates for

“The

Telecommunications
Act of 1996 Should
really be called the
Big Bandwidth Act,
because that’s what
it will mean if we
do our job right.”

ISDN, let companies in the marketplace
set the prices, and let competitors come
in and undercut it if they think the price
is too high.

Our national competition and deregula¬
tion policy depends on giving new
entrants the right to lease capacity and
unbundled network elements at a fair
price. And here’s a point where I think
the economists have it right — the fair
price is forward-looking economic cost,
which starts from something called Total
Element Long-Run Incremental Cost.
(“TELRIC” doesn’t include forward-look¬
ing common costs, which has been a
wholly unnecessary source of controver¬
sy.) Economists have sold us; not yet per¬
suaded our reviewing court, the Eighth
Circuit; but have made a sale with the
states: 33 of 35 states have used this
methodology in setting rates for unbun¬
dled network elements on their own,
with no mandate from the FCC.

If prices for sharing the existing network
are set based on these efficient pricing
principles, the marketplace will quickly
select the technologies that relieve
Internet congestion, won’t it?

Affordable Access

All the bandwidth in the world doesn’t
matter to you if you don’t have an afford¬

able way to access it. That’s why the
Federal-State joint board on universal
service has recommended that we spend
$2.25 billion a year to connect every
classroom and library in the country to
advanced telecommunications and infor¬
mation services. By bringing the In¬
ternet to schools we will not only revolu¬
tionize education, we will stimulate the
continued expansion of advanced net¬
works to every comer of America. The
money we spend in connecting the
schools, like the G.I. Bill and the
Marshall Plan, will be repaid many
times over in the benefits this effort
brings to our economy and our society.

According to the Wall Street Journal
poll, almost half of the surveyed econo¬
mists believe that more public spending
on education will promote growth.
However, it will take more than govern¬
ment alone to reach our educational net¬
working goals. I spent most of the day
today at a meeting sponsored by the
Packard Foundation to develop public-
private partnerships to bring computers
into schools. Net Day programs, which
started here in California, are a good
example of what a few companies and
individuals can do if they commit a small
amount of time and effort to connecting
schools in their area.

Right here at the University of Cali¬
fornia at Berkeley, there is a program
that uses the Internet to connect Berke¬
ley undergraduates with high school
seniors in a low-income minority high
school in San Francisco for “electronic
mentoring.” If the connectivity is there,
creative people will devise innovative
ways to take advantage of it.

I recently got a very complimentary e-
mail message from an “ardent net-
surfer” in Japan named Shoji Akao, who
said that he wished that the FCC was a
Japanese government organization. He
noted that, while NTT in Japan was
promising high-speed Internet connec¬
tivity for every household by the year
2010, the FCC is actually putting into
place today the competition policies that
are making affordable, high-bandwidth
Internet access a reality.

As the recent WTO agreement demon¬
strated, Mr. Akao doesn’t need to look to
the U.S. alone, although I appreciate the
compliment. All the countries of the
world are embracing the policies of com¬
petition and deregulation as the right
ones. They are the right policies for
telecommunications, and they are the
right policies for the Internet. ♦

74 Boardwatch - April 1997

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Notes From The Underground by Wallace Wang

HATE GROUPS ON THE INTERNET

Wallace Wang is the
author of

CompuServe For
Dummies, Visual
Basic For Dummies,
More Visual Basic
For Dummies,
Microsoft Office 97
For Dummies, and
More Microsoft
Office 97 For

When not working with
computers, he per¬
forms stand-up come¬
dy and has appeared
on A&E’s Evening at
the ImprovTV comedy
show. He can be
reached via e-mail at
70334.3672

bothecat@prodigy.net

N ewspapers and magazines are
heralding the development of the
Internet as the next revolution in
worldwide communication. But while
most people focus on the benefits of e-
mail or the World Wide Web, the popular
media seems to be ignoring another use for
the Internet.

Sending and receiving e-mail across continents can
bring families together and allow friends to stay in
touch, but the low-cost, worldwide availability of the
Internet is now being used by hate groups to recruit
and organize members who openly advocate the death
of people belonging to different ethnic backgrounds.

Don Black, the ex-Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan
and owner of the white supremacist home page
Stormfront, said that the “...Internet has had a pret¬
ty profound influence on a movement (white suprema¬
cist) whose resources are limited. The access is anony¬
mous and there is unlimited ability to communicate
with others of a like mind.” (New York Times, March
13,1995)

Since hate group activity is increasing as rapidly as
the growth of the Internet, an organization called
Hate Watch (http://hatewatch . org) has appeared as
a civic watchdog. Started in 1995, HateWatch pro¬
vides online resources for concerned individuals, aca¬
demics, organizations and the media to keep abreast
of and counteract hate activity in our world. As part of
its work, HateWatch provides links to hate group
home pages, tracks the use of these pages for recruit¬
ment purposes, and provides bibliographic informa¬
tion by and for leading scholars.

L ®£L £ g ffi

Dtnclor of HauWatch

links will certainly open our eyes to the variety of
beliefs that cause people to hate others just because
somebody told them it was the right thing to do. To
t start your tour of differing opinions, visit the

A ' ------.

According to HateWatch, a hate group is defined as
an organization or individual that advocates vio¬
lence against or unreasonable hostility toward those
persons or organizations identified by their race,
religion, national origin, sexual orientation, or gen¬
der — including organizations or individuals that
disseminate revised or historically inaccurate infor¬
mation with regard to these persons or organiza¬
tions. (So based on this definition, President George
Bush and his administration might fall under this
category, since they never revealed that they sold
weapons to Iraq and Panama, and then later
attacked both countries under the guise of “protect¬
ing American interests.”)

Although HateWatch doesn’t provide links to govern¬
ment organizations that fall under its hate group def¬
inition (you’ll have to visit www.kimsoft.com/kim-
spy.htm for a list of U.S. and foreign intelligence agen¬
cies), it does provide links to a variety of traditional
hate groups such as white supremacists, skinheads
(who are prime candidates for the Hair Club for Men
when they get older), foreign ultra-nationalists, black
radicals, neo-Nazis (who often live in countries that
the Nazis tried to wipe out during World War Two),
Holocaust deniers (who also deny that “Schindler’s
List” was ever made into a movie), Christian nation¬
alists (who believe in killing anyone who reminds
them of the commandment that says ‘Thou shalt not
kill’), anti-gay activists (does the Vatican fall under
this category?), anti-Christian groups (who prove that
they can hate Christians just as much as Christians
can hate others), and anti-Arab groups.

While individuals could use HateWatch to find the
nearest hate group to join and support, hate groups
can also browse the HateWatch links to find another
hate group somewhere in the world that specifically
|i hates them for no reason.

American Civil

unfairly dej

Review web site (http://webus
-civil/s

universally cruel and inhumane.

In case you want a second opinion about slavery, jump
to the Blacks & Jews web site (www.tiac.net
/users/lhl/Latest_B_J_Issues.html) where
you can learn that “The origin of the extensive slave
trade in Black flesh, conducted by Arabs at roughly
the same time as the transatlantic trade, is worth

76 Boardwatch - April 1997

examination. The predominant icons of Jewish philosophy,
Judah Halevi and Moses Maimonides, both harbored the most
vile anti-Black beliefs and encouraged among the Jews the
Curse of Ham myth which asserts that the African is black¬
skinned and subhuman as a result of a divine curse, appropri¬
ate only for service to White people.”

Since the Jewish people are often focused on by these hate
groups, perhaps it’s time for a viewpoint as reported by the
Jewish Defense League (www.jdl.org). Here you can learn
that “...in the end — with few exceptions — the Jew can look
to no one but another Jew for help and that the true solution
to the Jewish problem is the liquidation of the Exile and the
return of all Jews to Eretz Yisroel — the land of Israel. It
sees an immediate need to place Judaism over any other
‘ism’ and ideology and calls for the use of the yardstick: ‘Is it
good for Jews?”’

Naturally, neo-Nazis believe in a similar, yet conflicting yard¬
stick that asks, “Is it good for the Aryan race?” For another
viewpoint that the world would be a better place if 99% of the
world’s population would kindly commit suicide, visit the
National Alliance web site (www.natvan.com) and discover
that “After the sickness of‘multiculturalism,’ which is destroy¬
ing America, Britain, and every other Aryan nation in which it

is being promoted, has been swept away, we must again have
a racially clean area of the earth for the further development
of our people. We must have White schools, White residential
neighborhoods and recreation areas, White workplaces, White
farms and countryside.”

Of course, even being white doesn’t mean you’re necessarily
safe from attack. If you’re a white gay man or woman, watch
out for The Westboro Baptist Church (www. godhates
fags.com) the next time you visit Topeka, Kansas. This
church engages in “daily peaceful sidewalk demonstrations
opposing the homosexual lifestyle of soul-damning, nation-
destroying filth. We display large, colorful signs containing
Bible words and sentiments, including: GOD HATES FAGS,
FAGS HATE GOD, AIDS CURES FAGS, THANK GOD FOR
AIDS, FAGS BURN IN HELL, NO TEARS FOR QUEERS,
SIN & SHAME NOT PRIDE, FAG=ANAL SEX=DEATH,
FAG=AIDS= DEATH, GOD IS NOT MOCKED, FAGS ARE
NATURE FREAKS, GOD GAVE FAGS UP, NO SPECIAL
LAWS FOR FAGS, etc.” While anti-gay activists quote the
Bible to prove that homosexuals deserve to die, they conve¬
niently forget any other Biblical passages that may refute
their way of thinking such as forgiveness.

While it’s easy to dismiss the ideas of various hate groups as
the work of lunatics, fanatics, or mad men, keep in mind that
much of what you “know” has come from your government,
church, or school; and who knows what the ulterior motive
might really be?

Just remember that any time you join an organization based
on race, religion, or nationality, it’s easy to suddenly target
people outside of your organization as the enemy. Hatred can
come in all skin colors, religions, and nationalities, so rather
than blindly condemn entire groups of people for the actions of
a few, take a moment and ask yourself what goal you hope to
achieve and whether the destruction of an entire race will
really help you achieve it.

As long as people take the time to think and communicate
with one another, maybe we’ll all be able to live in peace. But
the moment one group believes that it has the right to dic¬
tate its demands on others, that’s when we’re all going to be
in trouble. ♦

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Boardwatch - April 1997 77

by Doug Shaker

A LITTLE MORE WORKING CODE AND
SOME ARCANA EXPLAINED

Doug Shaker is a
free-lance technical
writer in California.

He has one wife,
two children, three
pets, and five
computers. The
computers are
obviously out of hand.
He can be reached
via e-mail at mailto:

dougStheahakers
. org. Yes, that is a
personal Internet
domain. We told
you the computers
were getting
out of hand.

L ast month, I worked on the design for
some of the data acquisition part of
my Java stock analysis program. In brief,
I am planning a neural net analysis program
that will rely, in part, on a history of stock quotes for its
predictions. A object called QuoteLibrarian will be
responsible for finding and storing the quote data.
When asked for a quote, QuoteLibrarian will look in its
permanent storage for the quote and, if it isn’t there,
will ask NetQuoteGetter to get a quote from the web.
NetQuoteGetter will look at a list of NetQuoteSources
and ask each of them for the quote, one by one, until it
gets an answer. The answer will be in the form of an
object called, not surprisingly, a Quote. This Quote wifi
get passed up the line to QuoteLibrarian, who will then
pass it off to the object which requested it originally.

I said I’d try to implement these classes this month.
Ah, impetuous me—now I have to deliver on that
promise. The first thing I decided to do was to put
together a dummy application that would let me call
QuoteLibrarian. This actually turned out to be easier
said than done and at least a little instructive.

look in the MrDow file for a class named MrDow.
When it finds the MrDow class, the virtual machine
will look for a method named main in the MrDow
class. The virtual machine will start up that method,
passing off any command line arguments to the main
method as arguments for that method.

Having said that, we still need the right invocation of
the right keywords in the right places to make the
compiler happy. My mental model for the top level of
my application is now something like:

class MrDow {

maybe some variables declarations;
hocus pocus dominocus main(whatever){
QuoteLibrarian marian = new
QuoteLibrarian;

System.out.println(marian.doSomething());

The first thing you (and I) need to understand is that
there are two distinctly different things you can build
with a Java compiler. You can build applications
and you can build applets. Java applications are just
like applications in any other language in the world
in that they can write to disk, erase your files, start
other programs, etc. Applets, on the other hand, are
web objects which are part of a web page and which
are started on a machine when a web browser down¬
loads the page containing the applet. Since average
people browsing the web doesn’t like the idea of
applets trashing their systems, applets are severely
restricted in what they can do — they can’t write to
disk, they can’t connect to network hosts other than
the weh server from which they came, and they can’t
start other programs or load libraries on the web
browser system. Because my program is going to live
on my system more or less permanently and because
I want to be able to store things to the disk on my sys¬
tem, I am writing an application, not an applet.

If you write a C application, it always starts with a
central function called main. A Java application can’t
do exactly that because every function — a.k.a. method
— needs to live inside an object. Java applications need
to have a class which has the same name as the exe¬
cutable file, and that class must have a method called
main. Translating this to something concrete, if my
Java application is named MrDow, then when I start it
up, the Java virtual machine—the thing that makes
Java applications run when they are being run— will

This won’t exactly compile though. At a minimum, I
need to get a little clearer on the hocus pocus
dominocus and the whatever parts. I looked it up in
one of my Java books and this part of the application
really needs to look like:

public static void main(String args[])

This isn’t a whole lot clearer than the hocus pocus
stuff, but all main methods need to be declared like
this. You can just write it down, if you want to—
understanding is not necessary.

I think I can explain, though, if you want to know. The
public keyword means that the programmer gives
this method permission to be called by sources out¬
side the class. Since it needs to be called by the Java
virtual machine on behalf of the command line, this
had better be true, or we are going nowhere. The sta¬
tic keyword means that this method can only be
called at the class level, rather than only in instances.
This is a bit arcane. You usually only have static
methods if you aren’t going to have any instances—
i.e. there is only going to be one member of the class
so don’t go to the trouble of making instances—or if
you want to use the static methods to initialize some-

Boardwatch - April 1997

thing about the class. After the static keyword, the void key¬
word means that this method won’t return a value. Main is
the name of the method. The string args[] that is inside the
parentheses after main is an array of strings used as a way of
passing command line arguments to the inside of the program
from the outside. Is all that clear now? Good.

When I understood all that hocus pocus, the top level of my
application began to look like this:

import java.util.Date;
class MrDow {

public static void main(String args[]) {

Date today = new Date();

QuoteLibrarian marian = new QuoteLibrarian();
Quote todayQLIX = marian. getQuote( “QLIX”, today);
System.out.println(todayQLIX.toString());

}

The import line gives me access to the Java system utilities
having to do with dates. I use one of these to get today’s date.
The class line declares the name of the application and class
for this file, MrDow. The third line has all that mumbo jumbo
I have already explained.

The first chunk of code, from the beginning down to just before
the import statements, are two comments. Then, in the import
statements, the first one brings the Java class Date into the
file. The second import statement brings the Java class Double
into the file.

This class, Double, serves some explanation. If you have ever
programmed in C or, for that matter FORTRAN, you should be
familiar with the double precision floating point numbers,
usually referred to as doubles. They are a fundamental numer¬
ic data type in most languages, and Java is no exception.
Although nearly everything in Java is an object, there are a
few things that aren’t—the things that aren’t are called the
primitive data types. The primitive data types are, boolean,
char, byte, short, nit, long, float, and (our friend) double. If you
want to use these primitive data types for simple operations
they are there and don’t carry with them the mental and com¬
putational baggage of full objects. This means, for example,
that you can add two numbers together

X = 3.14159 + 1040.99999

without having to declare 3.14159 and 1040.99999 as two
floating point objects.

In the fourth line, I create a new Date object and give it the
name of today. By default, Date objects are set to today unless
you put some arguments inside the parentheses when you cre¬
ate them. This:

Date newYears = new Date(98,1,1);

would create an object named newYears and set to New Year’s
Day for 1998. Years are specified in relation to 1900, so
Date(101,l,l) would be New Year’s Day, 2001.1 don’t know if
negative years work or not, but I expect they do.

In the fifth line, I create a QuoteLibrarian object named mar¬
ian. Why Marian? Marian was the name of the librarian in the
musical The Music Man. One of the songs in the musical has
the title “Marian the Librarian” and it stuck in my memory
banks. Then, in the sixth line, I ask marian to get me today’s
quote for a stock with the symbol QLIX. I store the result in a
Quote object named todayQLIX. Then, in the last line, I ask
todayQLIX to make a printable string out of itself and I take
that result and ask the system to print it out.

If you tried to compile this code you would get, as I did, error
messages saying that the classes Quote and QuoteLibrarian
are undefined. Let’s tackle Quote next, as it is simplest.

Quote doesn’t need to do much but hold information. It needs
to hold a date, a stock symbol, and a price and then report on
them when requested. Listing 1 (see page 81) is pretty much
what we need—or at least I think it is. I have tried to comment
the expletive out of this listing, hoping to make it obvious
what I am doing, but, Lord knows, whenever I read someone
else’s code, it is never obvious, no matter how many comments
there are in it. So, let’s go through it.

If, on the other hand, you really want an object in your code,
there are “wrapper” classes that convert the primitive types
into objects. The class Double is the object equivalent of the
primitive data type double. In general, you can do more things
with the objects than you can with the primitive data types, so
they are more capable but less efficient. For this part of the
code, efficiency is unlikely to be of much consequence, so I
opted to store the quote price as a Double object. I therefore
needed to import the Java class that implements Double.

After the lines that import the classes, we start the class defi¬
nition with public class Quote. Quote needs to be a pub¬
lic class, so we can pass it around between all the different
chunks of the program.

After the class declaration, there is a short comment, then
three lines where I define the variables that I will use to store
the quote information. The stock symbol is stored as a String
object, the stock price is stored as a Double object, and the
quote date is stored as a Date object. These variables could
have been labeled as “public” variables if I wanted other
objects to be able to read them directly. However, as I men¬
tioned in my last column, it is usually a bad idea to allow vari¬
ables of a class to be directly accessed by other classes. For one
thing, it prevents you from changing some of the variables
from assigned values to calculated values. Instead, you should
have a set of methods for setting the variables—sometimes
called mutator methods—and a set of methods for getting the
values of the variables—sometimes called accessor methods.
These methods are defined further down in the class defini¬
tion where there are several methods that start with the
phrase get.

After the variable declarations, I define two constructor meth¬
ods. When another class wants to create a Quote, it will do
something like:

Boardwatch - April 1997 79

Quote someQuote = new Quote( someStock, somePrice,
someDate)

and the Java virtual machine will create a new Quote instance
to suit. Since the Quote class is so simple, all the constructors
really do is capture the information that is passed to them in
the creation call and store that information in the internal
variables. There are two versions of the constructor method,
since I wanted to be prepared whether I got passed a double
primitive data type or I got passed a Double object.

Then, after the constructor methods, there are the accessor
methods. These are real simple. They just return the values of
the internal variables.

Finally, we have a special method called toString. All Java
objects have a toString method somewhere in them. Unless you
define it otherwise, it will be the default toString method inher¬
ited from Object. The toString method is used when you pass an
object to a printing kind of object - more precisely, any instance
of the class PrintStream. When this happens, the PrintStream
instance will call the toString method in the object to be print¬
ed and will print the result. For example, if I write

System.out.println( todayQLIX);

then the system will call the toString method for todayQLIX
to find the characters to put on the screen. If you don’t write a
toString method, then your object will inherit another, much
less useful, version of toString from somewhere higher in the
Java object hierarchy. For your sanity, you should write a use¬
ful toString method for all of the objects you are likely to want
to print.

OK, now we have Quote laid out. Maybe there are flaws in it,
but we won’t know until we get some more classes written.
The next thing I want to try to write is NetQuoteSource. This
turned out to be much harder than I had thought it was going
to be. I eventually solved it with the aid of a book called
Hacking Java: The Java Professional’s Resource Kit, by
Mark Wutka (QUE, ISBN 078970935X, $59.99).

Here’s my difficult:. Most of the time, when I am browsing the
web, if I fill out a form and press the submit button, some
slightly encoded version of what I typed in shows up at the top
of my browser as the URL. The web server at the other end
grinds away at this fake URL, then returns the answer that I
wanted. I had figured, when I was going to get a quote, I would
just go to a brokerage house’s web page, look up a quote, then
copy down whatever was written at the top of the browser and
that would be enough use in my program. I went naively to
Charles Schwab & Co’s web page (www.schwab.com) and
asked for a quote for a stock. But none of the information I
typed showed up as the URL! I still got back the quote. What
was I going to use for my program’s URL?

Obviously, I had misunderstood something about forms. It
turns out there are two ways to submit information to a form

and the web page designer can choose either one. One is sub¬
mission by query and one is submission by post. The ones that
are submitted by query act the way in which I had expected
them to act—the information that is typed in is converted to
part of a CGI-related URL which is then sent across the net to
the web server. However, when the form is submitted by post,
a special TCP/IP packet is put together with just the form
information and it is sent directly to the web server without
showing up as a new URL. This is more difficult, but more effi¬
cient than submitting form information by. Hacking Java
has a good example of how to send data to a web server that
is expecting the form to be submitted by post. Listing 2 (see
page 81) shows my version of it.

This version is incomplete. Right now NetQuoteSource is set
up as an application in its own right, instead of as a class
called by other classes. This is because I wanted to be able to
test the code some before I printed it in a national magazine.
In the final version, I would expect the variable stockSymbol
to be passed down to the NetQuoteSource when it is called by
NetQuoteGetter. And, I would expect the request string to be
constructed from stockSymbol and other fields that are local
to NetQuoteSource.

Going through the main method briefly, I ask the system for a
connection to Schwab’s web server and I store that connection
in serverConn. Then I configure serverConn so that I can do
either input or output over the connection. I also ask the sys¬
tem to not use the browser caches for this connection — I want
a fresh quote from the Schwab server, not one that has been
sitting in the cache for a week. Then I do some mumbo-jumbo
to construct a header for the TCP/IP packet that I don’t really
understand. It looks like I am telling the web server on the
other end that I am sending it data for a program and telling
it the length of the data that I plan to send. Then I push my
request out over serverConn’s output stream and close the out¬
put stream.

Then, I open serverConn’s data input stream and gather the
data from that stream into a string. Then I should parse that
string to get the price of the quote, but I haven’t figured out a
good way of doing that yet. You see, I had thought I would get
something simple like a number in the response. Ah, silly me.
Instead, the response looks more like this:

And this is after most of the crap has been filtered out. In case
you don’t read HTML, this is a table entry in which subscripts
and superscripts have been used to write the number 7 and
5/8ths. In a move that is typical of computer programming in
general and mine in particular, I had forgotten that stocks are
quoted in eighths and that the brokerage web designer might
go to some trouble to present those eighths in a nice format.
Now I need to figure out how to get a number out of this
sludge in a way that might generalize across several different
quote sources. And I need to figure out a way of reintegrating
this code back into the main application that I’m building.
We’ll do that next month. ♦

80 Boardwatch - April 1997

LISTING 1

LISTING 2

/* Defines Quote

Should have the following methods:
getStock
getPrice
getDate
toString

and the usual constructors.*/

/* Import the Java system classes that
define Date and the class Double (as
opposed to its twin, the numeric type
double.*/

import java.util.Date;
import java.Iang.Double;

public class Quote {

//We store the actual data in these items.

String stockSymbol;

Double stockPrice;

Date quoteDate;

// Define the constructor methods.

// First one for the case in which we are
// handed a price in object format (Double),
public Quote( String s, Double p, Date d)

{

stockSymbol = s;
stockPrice = p;
quoteDate = d;

}

//Now a constructor for the case when we are
//handed a price in numeric type format
//double (lower case “d”) as opposed to
//then Double object (upper case “D”).
public Quote( String s, double p, Date d)

{

stockSymbol = s;
stockPrice = new Double(p);
quoteDate = d;

//Some public methods to let people get at
//the data from outside,
public String getStock()

{

return stockSymbol;

public Double getPrice()

{

return stockPrice;

public Date getDate()

{

return quoteDate;

//A public method that returns a printable string with the
//contents of the quote,
public String toString()

{

return stockSymbol + “closed at “ + stockPrice
+ “on “ + quoteDate;

/** NetQuoteSource

Set up as an application rather than a regular
class so that I can test the code.

import java.net.*;
import java.io.*;

class NetQuoteSource {

// stockSymbol would ordinarily get passed
// down from the calling class.

String stockSymbol = “QLIX”;

String nqsResponse = “”;

public static void main(String argsjj)

{

try {

//This stuff should get initialized somewhere else.

URL destURL =

new URL( “http://schwab.quote.com/fq/schwab/quote”);

String request = “request=Delayed+Quote&symbols=”

+ stockSymbol + “\r\n”;

//Open a connection to the web server.

URLConnection serverConn = destURL.openConnection();

//Tell Java that we intend to do output and
//input over this connection
serverConn.setDoOutput(true);
serverConn.setDolnput(true);

//Tell Java not to get the results from the
//browser caches - get it fresh from the server.
serverConn.setUseCaches(false);

//Mumbo jumbo that you need to do.
serverConn.setRequestProperty(

“Content-type” ,”application/octet-stream”);

//The server needs to know exactly how long a string
III am planning to send it.
serverConn.setRequestProperty(

“Content-length”,””+request.length());

//Now send the string over the output stream associated
//with the connection.

DataOutputStream outStream = new DataOutputStream(
serverConn.getOutputStream());
outStream.writeBytes(request);
outStream.close();

//Open the connection for input.

DatalnputStream inStream = new DatalnputStream(
serverConn.getlnputStreamO);
int ch;

//Put the input in a String
while ((ch = inStream.read/)) >=0){
nqsResponse = nqsResponse + ch;

}

//Close the input stream.
inStream.close();

//Now I need to parse that String to get
//the price out.

// But I haven’t done that part yet.

System.out.println( nqsResponse);

} catch (Exception e){
e.printStackTrace();

}

Boardwatch - April 1997 81

EDUCATION LINK

by Rea Andrew Redd

YOUR NEXT CAREER IN EDUCATION

Rea Andrew Redd

in southwestern
Pennsylvania
where he manages
a high school library,
teaches European
history and Scholastic
Achievement Test
preparation. On
occasion, he reenacts
American Civil War
battles with the
Ninth Pennsylvania
Reserves, an
historic, military

E-mail Rea at:
reddSgenesis
.duq.edu

A bout a decade ago Gary Larsen, in
his “Far Side” comic strip, drew two
admiring parents fawning over their nerd
child sitting in front of a blank TV sur¬
rounded by scattered game cartridges with a
joystick in his flinching hand. Both parents
| were thinking of the same classified which read,
“Wanted to start at $60,000 a year, an electronic
game enthusiast. Must be dedicated to the field and
have started before the age of five. Must be willing to
play electronic games 8 to 12 hours a day. Pay starts
immediately.”

Larsen could redraw it today and replace “play
electronic games” with “surf the net.” However, a
new study confirms, for the first time, that surfing
the net can increase a student’s classroom achieve¬
ment. Research from the Center for Applied Special
Technology associates students who have online
access with better comprehension, communication,
and presentation skills. Another recent survey by
the National Association of Colleges and Employers
shows an increasing demand for graduates with
computer skills. Graduates in computer science,
information systems, and computer programming
received 6.2 % of job offers in 1996, which is up
from 4.7% in 1995. Starting salaries increased 6.1%
in 1996 to $33,712.

At this point you may have asked yourself, “What do
I need to know about the electronic dimension of
education?” Perhaps you’re an undergraduate who
wants a cutting edge resume; or, you’re already
working and you need graduate credits for certifica¬
tion, a union contract, or to reach the next pay scale.
When students, you included, no longer need to go
somewhere for education, their accumulated credits
are meaningless. Employers may ask, “What do you
know?” The situation currently creates an opportu¬
nity to base achievement of professional competency
on a portfolio. Students are becoming clients, and
teachers are noticing that the standards of educa¬
tion are being redefined.

A campus library’s well-established measures —
such as the number of books and periodicals — now
include, and may be dominated by, measures of elec¬
tronic access to both campus and regional resources.
Faculty’s role is also expanding beyond the dispens¬
ing of knowledge and distilled wisdom. Now, it also
includes the ability to make sense of all the available
information resources.

If you think you’re behind the curve and that you
have to play catch-up, think again! The 1996 Campus
Computing Survey shows that, although technology is

saturating American campuses, the rate of implemen¬
tation by the faculty is slowing. Professionals will be
needed in two emerging fields: Instructional Inte¬
gration (II) and User Support (US). One-fourth of those
polled responded that II is the single most important
issue on their campuses. Obviously, if you are in an
undergraduate degree program or earning graduate
credits, then your course selection should be based
toward II and US seminars, workshops and courses.

Furthermore, one-third of the campuses polled are
using or have plans to use the Internet and the Web as
an instructional resource. Universities are beginning to
offer certifications and degrees in II and US fields.
Stanford University has added the Information
Resource Specialist Program (IRSP) which is a two-year
program offered through the Libraries and Academic
Information Resources Department. This program is
innovative because the student becomes a consultant in
a particular department and provides discipline-specif¬
ic support to the faculty. The student gains experience
in multimedia, networking, and the Web’s classroom
applications. More information about Stanford’s IRSP is
available at http://www-leland.stanford.edu/
dept/SUL/irs.

The Center for Applied Technology report is available
by calling 202-393-2427. For information on the
National Association of Colleges and Employers, visit
http://www.job.org. And, the Campus Computing
report is available by sending $35 to: Campus
Computing, Attention: Kenneth Green, PO Box
261242, Encino CA 91426-1242.

THE ELECTRONIC BLACKSBURG VILLAGE

The Virginia Polytechnic and State University
(VPSU) and other Montgomery County (Virginia)
dreamers are celebrating the fifth birthday of BEV,
the Blacksburg Electronic Village. In a virtual world,
this rural Shennandoah Valley/Blue Ridge Mountain
has a community presence. Blacksburg reports that
about 80% of its 34,590 residents use home comput¬
ers. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education,
in 1992 VPSU and other residents embraced the
Internet and, with the help of the town of Blacksburg
and Bell Atlantic, gave birth to BEV.

Originally conceived as a network for professor and
student remote access to academic resources, BEV
has been in front of the electronic wave. VPSU,
Blacksburg and Bell Atlantic allowed the townies to
hookup for $8.60 per month. Bell Atlantic, thinking
that the town/gown collaboration would be a good
experiment to test some new technology markets,

Boardwatch - April 1997

decided to spend $7 million to upgrade switches and connec¬
tions. Would an entire community access the Internet through
a local university for less than $9 a month? VPSU also saw it
as an experiment, and as an expansion of the educational
environment. Blacksburg businesses saw it as a development
of the marketplace. Now, what does BEV look like at age five?

Blacksburg has been offering $500 grants for the development
of web pages. By the end of 1995, $15,000 in grants had been
dispensed. Currently, four VPSU staff members work directly
on BEV doing research assistance, training, and site mainte¬
nance. Senior citizens have a strong presence through a local
history project. Generally, BEV gets mixed reviews from the
business community since Internet sales have been sluggish.

Apparently, the enterprise business life has improved. A popu¬
lar Blacksburg tavern has a web-browsing computer next to
the pool table which is the ultimate authority for settling bar
room bets. The antiquarian and used book store web site does
not have many hits, but the toy store has shipped orders to
other continents, thanks to the Web. Government at the town
and county level, has not entirely bought into the electronic vil¬
lage concept, neither has embraced the net. Users can send
complaints, but they can’t pay taxes or parking tickets elec¬
tronically. Montgomery County has no “bank-by-net.” Local,
not-for-profit organizations were not on the Web until Apple
Computer offered grants and expertise to do so. Terminology
and index terms on the net have proven difficult for the rural
population. One doctor points out that to reach local users, top¬
ics like “high sugar” and “diabetes” should be cross-referenced.

At its fifth birthday party, BEV should be congratulated for
successfully bringing together town and gown. Furthermore, it
has enhanced communication among senior citizens and cre¬
ated new market opportunities for some local businesses.
Maybe at its tenth birthday, BEV will celebrate the of munic¬
ipal and county government arrival to its network. It may look
back and thank its lucky star for online banking software that
allowed the local governments to collect tax revenue from peo¬
ple sitting at their homes in front of their computers.

THE K-12 BROWSER

As mentioned above, II and US are emerging fields. Classroom
Connect, one of America’s top ranked K-12 curriculum devel¬
opers, is launching II units each quarter. Teaching with the
Internet, a series of curriculum packages, has expanded
beyond introductory and discipline-specific volumes. The
Internet Curriculum Planning System is an annual subscrip¬
tion package ($199), which includes lesson plans, activity
sheets, project ideas, and method tips. Extensions to this

series cost $30 each and cover topics such as using the web to
teach K-12 or Social Studies. These extension products include
lesson plans, activities, and a CD-ROM with Internet links.

The Science Internet Curriculum Guide ($60) is for the 7-12
classroom and focuses on earth, life, and physical science. Its CD-
ROM includes the Netscape Navigator, Cyber Patrol, authoring
software, and science-related shareware. The Language Arts
Internet Curriculum Guide, which contains online project lesson
plans and a CD-ROM, will be introduced this spring.

Classroom Connects’ WebGuides ($15 each) are equally help¬
ful. These volumes are discipline-specific indices of web sites
for K-6, 7-12, music, math, science, and geography. Visit
Classroom Connect at http://www.classroom.net, or e-mail
can be sent to connect@classroom.net. Voice-call them at
800-638-1639 or fax them at 717-393-5752.

Another K-12 resource, which is among the best on the Web, is
the Social Information Research Service (SIRS). In addition to
the thousands of context-rich, full-text articles from some
1,200 sources, this package also contains several appealing
technology and content features. It has a point and click inter¬
face, relevancy rankings, natural language searching, and
monthly updates. Licensing costs for this package are flexible.
For a SIRS web preview, visit http://www.sirs.com/prod
ucts/sof tware/research/preview.htm.

THE COLLEGIATE BROWSER

U.S. News and World Report’s web site now offers its popu¬
lar ranking of American colleges (http://www.usnews .com/us
news/edu). This free site is part of the magazine’s online ser¬
vice. Users can sort information on nearly 400 colleges by
rank, cost, region, academic program, and other categories. A
nice feature is the site’s links to colleges’ web sites and relat¬
ed stories from U.S. News and World Report’s electronic
archive. Some colleges offer enrollment applications, which
can be completed online.

Foreign Languages

International language dictionaries have been abundant on
the net, but grammar guides have been lacking. However,
Robert Beard, a professor of linguistics at Bucknell University,
offers a new web site with the rules and usage of grammar.
This site also has links to dozens of tutorials and reference
materials. Over 20 European, African, and Asian languages
are represented. Even rare and extinct languages are includ¬
ed such as Quechua, which is spoken in the Andes Mountains,

Boardwatch - April 1997 83

or the 5,000 year-old Mesopotamian language of Akkadian.
Visit Professor Beard’s site at http://www.bucknell.edu/~r
beard/grammars.html.

History

Northwestern University is offering a database of speeches
and documents related to the history of rhetoric. The Douglas
Archive of American Public Address can be searched chrono¬
logically or by speaker, subject, or title. The URL is http://dou
glass.speech.nwu.edu.

H-Net is a humanities and social sciences site for graduate
students in history. It provides them with academic and career
information, graduate school admission data, historical
research, dissertation tips, and links to graduate history
departments. Visit http://h-net2.msu.edu/~grad/fyi to
access this resource.

H-Itam is a moderated forum for discussion among scholars
and activists interested in the Italian-American experience. It
is available through listserv0h-net.msu.edu as is anoth¬
er moderated forum among scholars involved in California
studies. Book reviews, course syllabi, and the California
Studies Association are available through this resource.

Lajsa is a moderated forum discussing history, culture, and
news related to the Jewish population in Latin America. It is
located at listproc@mcfeeley .cc .utexas. edu. The Illinois
Historical Society's web site directs its audience of students,
researchers, and educators to online resources related to work¬
er history. Site visitors can follow links to such diverse topics as
coal mining in northern Illinois, Samuel Gompers and the
founding of the American Federation of Labor, and labor unions
before the Civil War. A visit to http://www.kentlaw.edu/ilhs
will put you in touch with labor in the Land of Lincoln.

COLLEGE ADMINISTRATION

The Student Affairs Journal Online offers news and peer-
reviewed scholarly articles of interest for professionals in the
field of student affairs. This site includes an online workshop
on professional writing styles and links to related organiza¬
tions and publications. The URL is http://sajo.org.

As you may know, NCIT ended their satellite USENET news broadcast¬
ing in December of 1996. To help the owners of the NCIT system con¬
vert to the Planet Connect satellite Usenet system, we are offering a
special upgrade deal to NCIT customers. This is a limited time offer!
Contact Planet Connect as soon as possible to get the details.

Call 423-623-8300 from 9:00AM to 9:00PM est. or contact our Web
site at www.planetc.com.

Planet Connect WWW.PIanetC.COm

1065 Cosby Highway onm

Newport, Tennessee 37821 mfO@planetC.COm

423-623-8300 Voice

423-623-8751 Fax

84 Boardwatch - April 1997

The National Council of Black Students (NCBS) maintains a
web site that includes a mission statement, announcements, a
calendar of events, and membership information. Go to http://
www.eiu.edu/~ncbs for more information on the NCBS.

Information Science

Electronic Minds offers access to an electronic magazine dis¬
cussing how technology is shaping virtual communities and
the Web. The site includes discussion forums, news, commen¬
taries, a virtual community directory, and hypertext publica¬
tions. Visit Electric Minds at http://www.minds.com for a
thoughtful speculation of our virtual future.

Library Science and Reference Inside Information offers
access to a directory of federal web sites, independent agen¬
cies, and commissions. Highlighted subjects include statistical
data, maps, business and market research, and U.S. History.
At http://www.uncle-sam.com, you'll find this pathway
through the federal maze. H-Itam is also listed here. A mod¬
erated discussion forum is located through listserv®
library.berkeley.edu. You can join Web-41ib to converse
with other professionals on such issues as server mainte¬
nance, information mounting, and collection development.
Stac-Net is another discussion group for professionals who
wish to develop science and technology projects in the
Philippines. It is located at listserv@seagate. sunet. se.

The University of Massachusetts offers a web site entitled
“The Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval.” The site
contains resources pertaining to Research and Development

on electronic information systems, natural language process¬
ing, multimedia, and medical information. The center’s mis¬
sion statement, membership information, and publications
are also available at http://cd.ir. cs.umass. edu.

MEMO FROM THE DEEP POCKETS DEPARTMENT

$1 Million Available for Pennsylvania School

Keystone State students will now have better access to cut¬
ting-edge distance learning technology thanks to grants
recently awarded by the Pennsylvania Department of Edu¬
cation. Rural counties will benefit most from the grants which
were designed to fund programs for distance learning in pub¬
lic schools.

The Pennsylvania Department of Education is looking for
schools in 24 counties wishing to obtain or upgrade computer
and communication equipment which is to be used for web
and Internet based courses. For more information on these
grants, visit the Pennsylvania Department of Education web
site at http://www.cas.psu/pde.html. ♦

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Boardwatch - April 1997 85

MANNING THE WIRES

THE WEB IS FERTILE GROUND FOR DO-IT-YOURSELF
STOCK BROKERS

L ike everyone else, stockbrokers
and investment companies joined
the pilgrimage to the World Wide Web. They
pretty much had to. Their primary customer
base — affluent males with disposable incomes —
was already there.

Sherif A. Nada, president of Fidelity Brokerage Group
told Business Week that the full-service firms — and
the discounters — are worried about the Internet bro¬
kers. “What Schwab did to the full-service firms,
Lombard and E*Trade will do to Schwab and the full-
service firms,” he said.

Ric Manning

ness technology,
computers and
consumer electron¬
ics for The Courier-
Journal in Louis¬
ville, Ky. His weekly
column called Home
Tech is distributed
to more than 80
newspapers by the
Gannett News
Service and it’s
available on the
World Wide Web
http://iglou
• cam/gizweb

Ric was the
founding editor of
Plumb and Bulletin
Board Systems,
two newsletters
that covered the
BBS arena in the
early 1980s. His
freelance work
has appeared in
several magazines
including PC/
Computing, Mobile
Office, PC Week
and Home Office
Computing. Ric
lives in Southern
Indiana with his
wife, two children
and a champion
Weimaraner.
Write to Ric at

@iglou.com

But most did little more than erect a few billboards
and a post electronic brochures. Some offered stock
quotes and a few let clients review their portfolios
online. But if you wanted to buy or sell, you still had
to pick up the telephone.

For a while, brokers could blame government regula¬
tions and concerns about Internet security for their
reluctance to offer online transactions. For example,
brokers at securities firms don’t use e-mail.

But times have changed and the brokers haven’t
always kept up. Now you can safely shop and even
bank online. Why should you have to pick up a phone
— and wait until business hours — to trade stocks?

The regulations that worked against online trading
are also beginning to ease. Early this year, the
Securities and Exchange Commission said that online
services such as America Online and CompuServe
could accept referral fees from the Charles Schwab &
Co. brokerage firm.

Schwab quickly began letting its AOL customers
make online trades. And CompuServe made it easier
for its subscribers to use Schwab, E*Trade, and other
brokerage partners.

The online brokers are chasing a small but increas¬
ingly lucrative market. Of the 60 million brokerage
customers in the U.S., fewer than 1 million use com¬
mercial online services or the Internet. Forrester
Research Inc. estimates that there will be 1.2 million
such accounts by 1998.

Many online investors are attracted by the conve¬
nience of managing their investments from their PC.
Online brokerage accounts can be reached any time of
day or night, plus there’s a plethora of company infor¬
mation and reports online — though not nearly as
much as you’d find on pay services like Dow Jones
News/Retrieval.

Still others come for the discount prices. Just as
Schwab made its reputation by undercutting full-
service brokers, new upstart companies are chal¬
lenging the discount brokers with even lower fees
for online traders.

The competition is likely to heat up even more this
year due to a January ruling by the U.S. Securities
and Exchange Commission that allows brokerage
firms pay referral fees to online services. The ruling
said that America Online and CompuServe could col¬
lect fees from Charles Schwab & Co. without coming
under the agency’s jurisdiction.

When the smoke clears, these are the companies that
are likely to be still on the field:

E*TRADE

(www.etrade.com)

E*Trade, based in Palo Alto, CA, was created in 1983
to handle trades electronically for discount brokers. A
few years later, it went into competition with those
brokers by offering its service directly through
CompuServe and America Online.

E*Trade is now on the Web, where it has used its
technological edge to push trading fees to as low as
$15 for most transactions. The service will trade
stocks, bonds, and options but not futures. It offers
some no-load mutual funds.

The company has been aggressive in lining up new
partners. E*Trade recently hooked up with the
PointCast Network to distribute research reports on
more than 7,000 stocks through PointCast’s Companies

86 Boardwatch - April 1997

channel. Investors who open an account with E*Trade receive
more detailed versions of company reports, research, market
analysis, charts and analytical services.

Lombard Institutional Brokerage Inc.

(www.lombard.com)

San Francisco-based Lombard is a spin-off from Thomas F.
White & Co. Officials say the company has about 7,000
Internet accounts which make up about 15 percent of the com¬
pany’s annual revenue — and they say it will grow to 50 per¬
cent in the next two years.

Visitors to the Schwab site can get a few stock price charts in
a simple “candlestick” format. Account holders get their choice
of charts in 12 different formats.

Customers can also request research reports from services
such as Standard & Poor’s (S&P), First Call and Morningstar.
Prices start at $3 per report for single requests or $1.50 each
for 100 reports.

Stock and bond traders will pay about $35 to trade on the Web
or about $30 if they use the company’s proprietary software.

The Schwab site provides business and company news from
Briefing.com and it uses Thomson MarketEdge for reports on
company earnings and mergers and acquisitions.

ProTrade

(www.protrade.com)

ProTrade, based in Santa Barbara, may have the lowest
commissions of any of the online brokers. ProTrade charges
just $12 to trade any U.S. or Canadian equity. The service
requires a $1,000 deposit for a cash account or $2,000 for a
margin account.

ProTrade says it plans to offer free portfolio management for
members that have five or fewer securities. Another service
still under construction is ProAlerts, a service that will send e-
mail or signal your pager if a stock hits your predefined para¬
meters, such as price or trading volume.

Lombard tries to lure customers with financial information.
One of the more popular features of Lombard’s web site is its
free graph server. Visitors can get a visual picture of a stock’s
or option’s price movements for a single day or over a longer
historical period. Casual visitors can also get investment
information from Zack’s Research Reports.

Traders who open an account with Lombard get even more ser¬
vices, starting with a market summary updated every half hour
and proprietary research reports from Thomson Financial.

Traders can also arrange to get real time quotes, monitor their
account in real time and track up to ten securities, updated
every two minutes, through their Netscape browsers.

Charles Schwab & Co.

(www.Schwab.com)

American Express

(www.americanexpress.com)

Online trading at American Express comes in two flavors:
an InvestDirect account offers online trading, quotes and
account information. The InvestDirect/pt account includes
access to news and company research and stock and mutual
fund searches.

Research publications include S&P MarketScope company
reports, insider trading reports, Zack’s earnings estimates and
Macro World price forecasts.

How much will all this cost? It’s hard to say. American Express
doesn’t list its prices on its web site. I guess if you have to ask,
you can’t afford it.^

Boardwatch - April 1997 87

BIG BOARD BRIEFS

by Wallace Wang

Wallace Wang is the
author of

CompuServe For
Dummies, Visual
Basic For Dummies,
More Visual Basic
For Dummies,
Microsoft Office 97
For Dummies, and
More Microsoft
Office 97 For
Dummies.

When not working with
computers, he per¬
forms stand-up come¬
dy and has appeared
on A&E’s Evening at
the improvTV comedy
show. He can be

bothecat@prodigy.net

T rue to the typical doublespeak lan¬
guage that has made America Online a
favorite target for well-deserved scorn, AOL’s
chairman Steve Case told television’s CNBC that
the company would not offer refunds to any cus¬
tomers despite any problems they might have
encountered trying to access the service. Now under
the threat of lawsuits from several states, AOL has
bowed under the pressure to offer one free month of
service or a refund as much as $39.90 (equal to two
month’s of AOL’s $19.95 flat-fee).

So despite Steve Case’s callous response to customer
complaints, dissatisfied America Online customers
are going to get some compensation after all. Then
again, getting free months of service will be worthless
if you still can’t access the service when you want.

If you’ve been paying $19.95 a month to access to
America Online, you can get a cash refund by calling
1-800-827-6364. (As usual, be prepared to hear a
busy signal.) If you’d rather have a one month of free
online service in lieu of a refund, send your requests,
including name, address, master account screen
name and phone number, to AOL Member Refunds,
PO Box 511, Ogden, Utah 84402-0511. In case you’re
just fed up with the whole thing, you can cancel you
AOL membership by writing to AOL, P.0. Box 1600,
Ogden, Utah 84401, faxing 1-801-622-7969, or call¬
ing 1-888-265-8008.

For those who decide to stay with America Online,
just remember that Steve Case has asked that all
AOL customers limit their usage so everyone can
enjoy the service. This is like having an all-you-can-
eat restaurant ask that you refrain from eating all
you want just so the company can continue making
money off other people who won’t be able to get what
they paid for either.

In case you don’t cooperate and insist on using a ser¬
vice you paid for, America Online will pop up a dialog
box every 45 minutes, asking that log you off. Of
course, some parts of America Online won’t display
this dialog box, so don’t be surprised to find yourself
cut off without warning.

PRODIGY INTERNET DEBUTS ONLINE
CALCULATORS

Wondering how you can keep your finances straight?
Rather than trust a high-priced financial advisor, you
can dial into Prodigy’s Calculate It!, a new personal
finance section on Prodigy Internet featuring more
than 40 online calculators.

Calculate It!, offered at no additional charge, is avail¬
able as a pop-up menu choice in the Business &
Finance section of Prodigy Internet, or by typing the
GoTo word: calculate it. You can use these calculators
to see how much you’ll go into debt by purchasing
homes, automobiles or other high-priced items that
you probably can’t afford.

For example, you can use the calculators to help you
decide whether you can save money renting or if
you’ll be better off buying your own home. If you
decide to buy, use another calculator to determine
monthly payments, closing costs, the differences
between 15-year to 30-year mortgages, etc.

BARNES & NOBLE TO SET UP SHOP ON AOL

Barnes & Noble (Keyword: Barnes & Noble) has
signed a deal with America Online to become the
exclusive bookseller in the online service’s
Marketplace. Online shoppers will receive a 30 per¬
cent discount on all hard-cover books and a 20 per¬
cent discount on paperbacks. The discounts offered
online are higher than those offered in Barnes &
Noble retail stores.

“The economics of online retailing are very different
from those of store retailing,” said Chief Operating
Officer Steve Riggio. “Online customers complete
their own transaction and therefore not only expect to
receive, but are entitled to receive, direct-from-ware-
house pricing,”

The deal is Barnes & Noble’s first venture into online
commerce. The company plans to launch a World
Wide Web site after the AOL site is fully operational.

Boardwatch - April 1997

MSN INKS A DEAL
WITH THE MUPPETS

Microsoft has announced a deal with
Jim Henson Interactive to develop
interactive entertainment featuring the
Muppets exclusively for the Microsoft
Network. The first projects, which also
will feature new characters created for
MSN, are expected to appear this sum¬
mer. The three-year deal calls for two
projects in the first year, three in the
second and four in the third.

Details of the projects are still sketchy,
although both sides have agreed that the
projects will be a mix of games and shows
that appears daily or weekly, allowing
MSN to create regular viewers similar to
a TV show. Microsoft’s ultimate plan may
be to outflank the television industry by
providing interactive entertainment
through the Internet. Now if MSN could
only squeeze Miss Piggy into a string
bikini, it might have a chance of luring
away viewers from shows like Baywatch
and Melrose Place.

COMPETITORS PICK UP ON
AMERICA ONLINE DEFECTORS

America Online’s woes have translated
into a windfall for its competitors.
Already AT&T has reported three times
the number of daily sign-ups in January
than in December. Nearly 45 percent of
AT&T’s latest subscribers were former
America Online members, looking for
more reliable Internet service.

Even sluggish CompuServe has gotten
into the act. After avoiding any form of
advertising for years and then wonder¬
ing why they never could keep up with
America Online’s skyrocketing growth,
CompuServe had the guts to run a 30-
second TV spot during the Super Bowl,
called the Busy Signal. As a final jab in
the ribs, CompuServe’s ad provided a
toll-free number, 1-888-NOT-BUSY. (In
case you missed this ad, you can down¬
load the AVI file from CompuServe’s
web site at www. CompuServe. com.)

To keep its momentum going, Compu¬
Serve plans additional print ads in major
newspapers to capitalize on America
Online’s stupidity. “Given the recent
reports of connection problems within
our industry,” says Scott Kauffman,
CompuServe vice president, “we want
people to know about the high reliability
of CompuServe’s worldwide network. In
fact, CompuServe members connect on
the first try 97 percent of the time.”

Prodigy has even seen its daily enroll¬
ment jump by 300 percent since

America Online’s troubles. Prodigy
recently offered its own flat-rate pricing
scheme but claims it could double mem¬
bership and still provide adequate ser¬
vice to everyone. Prodigy claims that
their members connect on the first call
95 percent of the time compared with 26
percent of the time for the typical
America Online member.

MSN LURES
HOLLYWOOD TALENT

While rival online services scramble to
offer unique forums, magazines, or
games for members, The Microsoft
Network continues its quest to become
the couch potato channel for Internet
surfers. Microsoft recently hired Robert
Litvak, a veteran casting director for
ABC and Warner Brothers, as its new
talent and casting manager for the
Interactive Media division. Microsoft
hopes that Litvak will use his
Hollywood contacts to lure more
Hollywood veterans to MSN.

“What’s interesting is that we get calls
on a daily basis about Microsoft versus
Netscape, or Microsoft versus Lotus.
How about Microsoft versus Disney?”
asks Danny Rimer, an analyst with
Hambrecht & Quist who follows MSN.

Microsoft’s goal is to sign up 3.2 million
users by July, a 50 percent increase from
the current 2+ million user base. It’slong
range plan is to attract the same audi¬
ence that would normally watch TV. To
continue this metaphor, MSN employees
even describe content as “shows,” which
are now ending their first 13-week “sea¬
son.” (Let’s just hope that MSN doesn’t
resort to feminine hygiene commercials
to pay for content.)

AMERICA ONLINE HIRES A
FORMER CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE
AGENCY EMPLOYEE

In response to the threats from hackers
(but ignoring the threats from pedophiles;
see the next section below), America
Online has hired Tatiana Gau, a former
Central Intelligence Agency employee
and expert on industrial espionage.

“Whether it’s hackers or people who
password fish, she will make it very dif¬
ficult for people who engage in activities
that are outside AOL’s terms of service,”
said Wendy Goldberg, a company
spokeswoman. “It’s more than security.
It’s maintaining the integrity of the
AOL experience.”

Gau comes to America Online from the
CIA’s Office of Security. As part of her

new duties, Gau will coordinate a staff
of 20 to catch hackers using the service
through fake credit cards or breaking
America Online’s Terms of Service.

Gau attended Pushkin University in
Moscow and holds a B.S. from
Georgetown University. She is a mem¬
ber of the Society of Competitive
Intelligence Professionals, the American
Society of Industrial Security and the
Association of Former Intelligence
Officers. Besides speaking English, she
also speaks French, Italian, Spanish,
Portuguese, and Russian.

So how effective will Gau be in policing
America Online? Considering the next
section, she’s either ignoring pedophiles
in favor of hackers, or she’s not doing
her job at all.

PEDOPHILES ONLINE

A Florida woman, is suing America
Online for allegedly allowing a man,
later convicted as a sex offender, to use
the service to sell images of his sex acts
with her 11-year-old boy and two other
youths to pedophiles.

The lawsuit contends that AOL has cre¬
ated “a home shopping network for
pedophiles and child pornographers,”
arguing the online service is responsible
for the content of the material available
on its services and has failed to enforce
its rules and monitor its subscribers.
Named in the suit was a former Palm
Beach schoolteacher, Ron Russell, who
was convicted of an array of sexual
charges. Russell was arrested in
February 1995 after a federal investiga¬
tion into a ring of men, several of them
teachers, who swapped child pornogra¬
phy by computer. Currently, he is serv¬
ing a 22-year sentence for attempted
sexual battery and a 14-year sentence
on child pornography charges.

Given the fact that 24 hours a day you
can find at least a dozen chat rooms
serving up racy content, sexual innuen¬
does, and offers to trade GIF files of
naked people, does anyone seriously
believe America Online enforces its
rules prohibiting members from trans¬
mitting obscene or illegal material?
After all, pedophiles and prostitutes pay
their bills just like everyone else, and if
you can make a quick buck off them in
the process, why not do so just like
America Online?^

Boardwatch - April 1997 89

CYBERWORLD MONITOR

INDEPENDENCE IN CYBERSPACE WILL BE UNDERMINED IN
1997 BY ACCESS FEES

(C/'Governments of the Industrial World, you
\JTweary giants of flesh and steel, I come
from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On
behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to
leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You
have no sovereignty where we gather.”

But, what the multinationals lack in creativity and
dynamism, they make up for by “paying for friends in
high places.” In the last U.S. presidential election,
AT&T, the Baby Bells, other telecom, broadcast and
entertainment companies led in financial contribu¬
tions to both parties, outdistancing online entities by

Frank X. Sowa is
president of
The Xavier Group,
an international
consultancy providing
strategic planning,
forecasting, training,
and development
of business and
communications
systems for
organizations since
1981. As a certified
software consultant for
Softarc’s First Class,
and a reseller for
other companies,
he configures
customized BBS
systems for organiza¬
tions, complete with
“regular content
updates.” Sowa is
also founder and
sysop of SEED.NET
(412) 487-5449, “the
online incubator” for
small businesses, a
seamless BBS-to-
Internet (PPP)
provider, with
business start-up
assistance and

From “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyber-space”
John Perry Barlow Feb. 8,1996, on the Internet

The multinationals, with their friends in high
places, are working harder than ever to establish
their empires footholds in cyberspace. And it looks
like 1997 will finally be the year their empires suc¬
ceed, unless the average netizen finally hears the
call to defend the Internet and forces government’s
regulatory hands.

WHEN AT FIRST YOU DON’T SUCCEED, TRY
GOVERNMENT INTERVENTION!

The telecommunications, broadcast and entertain¬
ment giants of the 20th Century have never under¬
stood the paradigm of “cyberspace.” In their view, they
only have one vision: Global commerce on the Net is
expected to reel in $85.6 billion by 2000, up from an
estimated $2.2 billion in 1995, and they want to “con¬
trol” the lion’s share of that trade by maintaining con¬
trols over content and access. This is wishful thinking
by strategists who have only limited experiences ven¬
turing out on the Net.

almost 20:1.

THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK

The multinationals are moving the cyberturf battle to
a more familiar territory—a territory where their
pandering and ability to manipulate both the rules
and the players by throwing perks and money is
potentially within their grasp. There, they can manip¬
ulate “polls” and information in such a way that it
becomes obvious that the only “politically expedient”
approach is to cater to their whims.

By “buying off” key players in the Executive and
Legislative Branches who run the committees that
control the purse strings and regulatory environment.
They hope to sway public and commission opinion to
see the world from their point of view.

For Internet start-ups, it’s like being a boxer in a title
fight, and being warned by the referee several times
to “keep it clean” or he’ll declare your challenger the
winner; while your opponent continues to pummel
you “below the belt.”

TELECOMS PUSH FOR ACCESS
FEE LEGISLATION

available online.

Many of these companies have already shown us
they have no idea how to develop online content, how
to maximize access, how to keep customers, how to
operate in a virtual world profitably. Thus, their ini¬
tial ventures out into cyberspace have been anything
but successful.

AT&T has redesigned its original online concept at
great expense so many times, that they now lack any
credibility in the field whatsoever. Recently, WorldNet
went through its sixth major upheaval since its incep¬
tion. The Microsoft Network (MSN) likewise has faced
cutbacks in recent months. (But at least they under¬
stand how to put a positive spins on their disarray—
leading people to believe it was planned that way.)
Other examples among the multinationals worldwide
abound. To their dismay, they continue to be walked all
over by garage-based start-ups, that creatively under¬
stand what cyberspace is all about, as has been report¬
ed in Boardwatch for some time now.

After some hard lobbying by the telecom companies,
notably Pacific Telesis and Bell Atlantic, the Federal
Communications Commission (FCC) agreed in
December to explore ways to ease network congestion
caused by soaring Internet usage which the phone
companies contend is “leading to a breakdown in the
public telephone network unless Internet providers
are forced to pay the phone companies ‘access fees’ for
using local lines to route Internet traffic.”

Bell Atlantic, for example, who just launched its own
ISP service at an aggressive $17.95 flat-fee per
month, had already registered its request with the
Pennsylvania Public Utilities Commission, to
increase access fees from $300/month to
$18,000/month for “other” ISPs located within the
state. The commission (who has been stacked with
Bell Atlantic loyalists) agreed with the request, until
a class action lawsuit was filed against Bell Atlantic
and the commission by other Pennsylvania ISPs to

Boardwatch - April 1997

stop its implementation. The ISPs con¬
tended that such access fees were anti¬
competitive, and that they would force
the majority of start-ups out of business.
The new tariff now sits in limbo until
the Spring of 1998, awaiting federal
intervention by the FCC.

According to Lee Bauman, a Pacific
Telesis vice president , the absence of
such compensation for the phone com¬
panies is definitely going to create a ser¬
vice breakdown, because he says, tele¬
phone companies need the extra monies
to upgrade their networks, which were
originally designed to handle voice, not
data. Bauman told the FCC, “The lack of
access fees has now become a critical
roadblock to the development of new,
more efficient products for the rapidly
growing Internet markets.” He said this
in a year when both Pacific Telesis and
Bell Atlantic reported record profits for
their shareholders.

FCC TAKES ON THE DEBATE
AT THE FEDERAL LEVEL

The FCC’s request for public comments
on a “Notice of Proposed Rule Making on
Access Charge Reform” raises the ques¬
tion: “Should ISPs be required to pay
phone companies per-minute access
charges, which will probably be passed
on to the ISPs’ customers?”

The introduction states: “Since 1983,
there has been an ongoing debate about
whether enhanced service providers
[ISPs] should be required to pay access
charges, based on the contention that
these companies use local networks in the
same manner as long-distance carriers.

“In June 1996, four local telephone com¬
panies (Pacific Bell, Bell Atlantic, US
West, and NYNEX) submitted studies to
the FCC concerning the effects of
Internet usage on these carriers’ net¬
works. The companies argued that the
existing rate structure did not reflect the
costs imposed on local telephone compa¬
nies to support Internet access, and that
Internet usage was causing congestion in
part of the local network. In connection
with these studies and other pleadings,
several local phone companies have
asked the FCC for authority to charge
interstate access charges to ISPs.”

INTERNET CONSUMERS
WILL FOOT THE BILL

Internet consumers will end up footing
the bill if the phone companies get then-
way, passed on in the form of higher
rates. Not only will access fees drive up
the cost of using modems and digital

connections via the phone lines to get on
the Internet, but these excessive tariffs
will drive 85% of the ISPs—those that
are small or marginally-profitable — out
of business providing consumers with far
less options of who they get their
Internet services from. This will have
the opposite effect on the marketplace
than what was demanded by the free
market competitive wording found in
the Telecommunications Act of 1996.

Furthermore, there is more than suffi¬
cient evidence to show that the phone
companies’ scare tactic claims of net¬
work overload are greatly exaggerated.
"If the commission awards large new
fees to (local phone companies) for
access to the (local phone networks),
there will be a significant risk that the
only winners will be the phone compa¬
nies while consumers and the entire
Internet online industry will lose,”
Matthew Korn, America Online vice
president, testified.

The FCC, overburdened by angry neti-
zens, is working to spin the discussion
away from access fees and toward tech¬
nology so the public won’t be offended by
the fees when they are implemented later
this year. Commissioner Susan Ness
advised participants that "the discussion
shouldn’t only be about money, but should
be focused on technology.” By moving the
discussion toward looking at ISDN for all
consumers, for example, the FCC hopes to
create a public perception that the access
fees could be a “good thing.”

THE FCC IS WAFFLING TO HELP
THE PHONE COMPANIES

To date, the FCC has tentatively dis¬
agreed with the phone companies.
Reported in this column, just two
months ago, the FCC deemed that
Internet and online services are not
telecommunications services, and as
such are not subject to the FCC’s regu¬
latory regiment.

The FCC’s Federal-State Joint Board at
that time, agreed that the Internet is an
unregulated, non-governmental and
self-administered network for global
information exchange that “relies to a
large degree on existing telecommunica¬
tions carriers for the underlying trans¬
port facilities that constitute the
Internet’s backbone, as well as for local
loop connections to individual Internet
servers and users.” It went on to explain
the Internet is really only a set of indus¬
try standards or protocols that “run over
the telecommunications infrastruc¬
ture”—a means by which networks com¬
municate—just as voice transmissions

run over the telecommunications infra¬
structure to allow people to communi¬
cate. As such, it said none of the ISPs, e-
mail, or information services should be
subject to FCC or state telecommunica¬
tions regulations.

But, as the telecommunications compa¬
nies have continued to put on the pres¬
sure, the FCC has revised its stance.
“The FCC’s initial proposal is that ISPs
should not be required to pay current
access charges, but the Commission has
made no final decisions,” it now says.

“The Commission expressed concern
about the effects that imposition of
access charges could have on the com¬
petitive ISP marketplace, and also
noted that the Internet would likely not
have grown so rapidly in recent years if
most users had been required to pay
per-minute rates for Internet access.”
But, it seems to have now added that
such a stance “could change” in the near
future. The FCC plans to issue a Report
and Order on reforming the interstate
access charge system by May 1997. The
deadline for comments was March 24;
the deadline for reply comments (com¬
ments responding to the initial round of
comments) is April 23.

^TWNET

Nothing Bui NEtworui % AJ -‘ML

Boardwatch - April 1997 91

ADVICE FOR THE MULTINATIONALS
AND GOVERNMENTS

If telecommunications, broadcast and entertainment giants
really understood the cyber-marketplace, they’d have a clear¬
er idea that the Internet is not a “global city”, but rather a
“frontier town” at best. Frontier towns despise outside carpet¬
bagging by disassociated empires. Frontier towns have no
desire to implement politically acceptable laws; they have
their own means to maintain law and order. It is not until
frontier towns become major cities through extensive trade
outside their region—that outside rules have any impact.

Governments need to take heed. History provides many
lessons. The French, American and Bolshevik Revolutions; the
Cade and Whiskey Rebellions; the Alamo; Vietnam—all show
what happens when governments try to impose laws that run
counter to the desires of the citizenry. I predict regulations on
the Internet imposed without netizen support will face a sim¬
ilar outcome.

THE COST OF THE FIGHT

For example, what would make more sense? Should Bell
Atlantic/Nynex start its own ISP service, request Public Utility
Commission intervention to raise Inter LATA access fees on exist¬
ing small ISPs from $300/month to $18,000/month, inundate the
FCC with lobbyists requesting revisions to “universal service”
and “access fees” heavily taxing Internet providers as “common
carriers,” and effectively try to put the smaller competition out of
business? Or, would it make more sense, if a company like Bell
Atlantic/Nynex used the money it is paying lobbyists, the soft
money it is spending on lining up politicians and regulators, and
the start-up costs and headaches of developing and promoting its
own ISP to develop a comprehensive alliance program with the
smallest ISPs in its region—and use that as an effective buffer
against its telecom competitors who are drooling over the
prospects of the East Coast region? There are over 1,800 of these
small ISPs—all providing Bell Atlantic with about 5,000 digital
customers each. That is a lot of bandwidth that companies like
AT&T would love to get their hands on.

Rather than forcing worn-out ways of doing things on the
cyberworld, multinationals and governments would do better
to embrace the “pioneers” of the Information Age. This would
best be accomplished through mutually-beneficial alliances
with small and start-up Internet ventures—not through the
threat of a destructive regulatory environment. As a strategist
for major corporations for over two decades, it always seemed
to me that the multinationals’ strengths in linkage technolo¬
gies, sophisticated marketing appeals, and network engineer¬
ing expertise could lead to larger profits in cyberspace if they
worked to enhance the efforts of small ISPs—who have a bet¬
ter “hands-on” cyber-experience in dealing with service prob¬
lems on a face-to-face basis.

Now, guess what tact Bell Atlantic/Nynex is pursuing? Yep, they
are more concerned about putting the little guy out of business.
But, in defense of Bell Atlantic, they are not acting alone. Like
drones, they are just “benchmarking” their approaches to copy
what all the others in their business are doing.

STRATEGIES FOR SURVIVAL: TIME TO ACT

Without responsible input from ISP owners and netizens at
both the state and federal levels, the lobbyists, and pander¬
ing by the phone companies will win out in cyberspace over
a more reasoned approach. The FCC has asked for responsi¬
ble comments. It would like to know what you are thinking,
because, in its words “the development of the Internet may
raise issues beyond the scope of the access fee reform.” The
request for input is designed’ to help the FCC decide
whether access fees may be needed to create incentives for
the deployment of more efficient data services.

In submitting your comments, please be aware of the following:

1) You may file “formal” comments in writing, sending the
written transcript to the FCC, 1919 M Street, Washington
D.C. 20510. Be sure to include the Docket No. on the envelope
and on each page of your transcript.

2) You may file informal comments by electronic mail by send¬
ing them to isp@fcc.gov. However, please note that “infor¬
mal comments” does not mean “casual.” It means “less formal
than written comments,” but there are still requirements for
the format (e.g., putting the docket number in the subject line,
providing a mailing address, etc.). Before filing comments,
please review the information atwww.fcc.gov/isp.html.

3) Deadline for these comments is March 24,1997. Reply com¬
ments to these comments must be filed by April 23,1997.

You should also send your comments to the White House
and Congress, who after the May filing deadline of the FCC
are expected to take up the discussion in committees that
may write and adapt new access fee laws. It is a long battle,
that gives the panderers the upper hand. Only broad public
display of opposition will undermine their efforts. The time
to act is now! ♦

For more information see:
www.fcc.gov/isp.html
www.fcc.gov/access_fees.html

92 Boardwatch - April 1997

Growing and
Funding Your
ISP Business

Legal and
Legislative Issues

tchnical Operation -

I P Connectivity
Technologies

| Web Servers,
ing and Design

j6k modem
schnologies

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PUTTING THE NET TO WORK

by Durant
Imboden

Durant Imboden Is a
freelance writer
whose credentials
include published
novels and nonfic¬
tion, fiction editing
and staff writing for
Playboy, travel writ¬
ing for corporate
clients, and repre¬
senting authors at a
New York literary
agency. He currently
manages the Writing
Forum on The
Microsoft Network
and co-authors the
“Flame Wars” col¬
umn on Delphi,

editorial consultant.
Durant maintains a
Web site for writers
at imboden
^writing. org

CYBERBOOZE

T here was a time, not so many decades
ago, when any young man who
„ aspired to be a sophisticate felt com¬
pelled to learn the finer points of
booze and bartending. Downy-
cheeked frat rats expounded on
the perfect Martini, while
earnest young stockbrokers asked
the Playboy Advisor to explain the difference
between “whisky” and “whiskey” or the meaning of
“bottled in bond.”

Such concerns fell by the wayside in the ‘60s and ‘70s
as young men (and, yes, young women) abandoned
the Cuba Libre and Johnny Walker Black Label for
sweet fizzy wines and Acapulco Gold. Then came the
Yuppie decade of the ‘80s, when patrons of BMW and
The Sharper Image developed a taste for coke with¬
out the rum.

Still, as the proprietors of revolving restaurants are
fond of saying, “What goes around comes around.”
Today, the Martini is once again a symbol of sophis¬
tication, and “brown goods” (as whiskies are called
in the trade) are back in fashion. There is, however,
one significant difference between today’s young
people and those of 30 years ago: The aspiring
sophisticates of the late 1990s can bone up on booze
via the Internet.

In this month’s column, I’ll introduce our younger
readers to web resources that can help them learn
about liquor without having to touch alcohol..

IMPORTANT: You must be 21 or older to read the fol¬
lowing text. If you are not of legal drinking age, close
your eyes and turn the page right now!

duction to Scotch whisky, look no further than
..corn, at—you guessed it—http://scotch.com.

Scotch.com bears an award that identifies it as being
among the top 5% of all web sites, which puts it in an
elite group of perhaps 50,000 or 100,000 URLs. In any
case, it does have a great deal of useful information—
which shouldn’t be surprising, since the site comes
from the distributors of Johnny Walker, Dewar’s, and
Pinch. It’s also endorsed by The Classic Malts Society
and the editors of Slainte (pronounced “SLAN-juh”), a
magazine for aficionados of single-malt Scotch. Visit
Scotch.com for illustrated descriptions of the ferment¬
ing and distillation process, a guide to several leading
brands of blended and single-malt whiskies, and the
chance to send a picture postcard to your Scotch-lov¬
ing friends.

Speaking of Dewar’s, that brand has its own Dewar’s
Desperately Need Your Help! site at. www.dewars
.co.uk You won’t learn much about drinking here, but
you can win a prize by helping the company track down
its eccentric (and missing) founder in an online game.

J&B Castle Tour (www.j-b.com/castle/html/
cwt-indx.html) blends whiskey lore with a catchy
interface. Memorize the glossary of distiller’s terms so
you can impress your friends with references to
“wort,” “coffey-still,” and “marrying.”

The Whisky Web is an independent site that no
Scotch connoisseur ought to miss. Its collection of
pages at www.whiskyweb.com/maltfile includes
descriptions of Scotland’s whisky-producing areas, an
essay on “the art of nosing,” and an elaborate e-form
that lets you “search for your favorite dram” based on
characteristics such as region, peatiness, sweetness,
nose, and other characteristics.

WHISK(E)Y

The British use the spelling
hisky.” In America and
Ireland, the preferred term
is “whiskey.” Either way, it’s
a beverage made by distill¬
ing alcohol from fermented
barley, corn, wheat, or rye.

Scotch may be the oldest
type of whisky, having been
distilled for more than 500
years. It also has the most aristocratic image of any
grain-based spirit, even if it does come from a nation
of dour Presbyterians whose men wear skirts mod¬
eled after parochial-school uniforms. For a good intro-

If you’d rather put peat in your garden than on your
palate, a classic American whiskey might be more to
your taste. The good people of Lynchburg, Tennessee
celebrate the Jack Daniel’s Distillery “just down
the road a click or two” at www.jackdaniels.com.
Stop by Jack’s place, and you can listen to .WAV or
.AU files of whiskey being poured straight, on the
rocks, or with a splash of branch water. A screen saver
is yours for the asking. Still (or maybe I should say
“distill”), the best feature is the line that says, “This
site is best viewed with Jack Daniel’s Old No. 7.0.”

WHITE GOODS

What? You’re not a whisky-drinker? Then visit Stoli
Central 2.0, the latest generation of the Russian
vodka’s online home at www. stoli. com.. The colored

94 Boardwatch - April 1997

type can be hard to read against the
black background, but you’ll learn all
about Stolichnava Vodkas and sister
products such as Bombay Gin, Metaxa,
and the French pastis.

Another famous brand in the “white
goods” category is Tanqueray, a gin
that has long enjoyed snob status with
upscale Martini drinkers. The compa¬
ny’s web site at www.tanqueray.com
practically hypnotizes visitors with
dancing ice cubes before providing
entertainment in the form of
“Tanqueray Escapades” of the click-and-
see-hip-things-happen variety. Dig deep
enough, and you’ll happen upon a
“Distillery Process” page in “The Vault”
that explains the history and manufac¬
ture of aqua juniperi. (Did you know
that distillation was invented in
Salerno, Italy around AD 1100? I didn’t.)

LATIN LIQUOR

Rum has been poured into North
American stomachs and baked goods
since the Colonial era. The pale or dark
spirit, distilled from fermented sugar
cane, has slipped in popularity during
the last few decades. However, it
remains an essential souvenir for any¬
one visiting the Caribbean.

The biggest rum site on the Web is Club
Bacardi. Its URL is www.bacardi
. com. Cuba Libre and Mai Tai fans can
use the “drink wizard” to assemble
mixed drinks from ingredients on hand,
play a mystery game in the Casino, or
get lists of recommended bars in coun¬
tries on five continents. Unfortunately,
the site has very little information on
the differences between various types of
rum or how rum is made.

Tequila is another distilled beverage
that gets short shrift on the Web. The
Tequila Home Page (www.io.com/
-elvis) includes a bit of history and
technical information on the liquor
(“copied without permission from The
Bartender’s Bible”) and invites readers

to submit their own “tequila stories
and rituals.”

For tequila information without copy¬
right infringement, sample Tequila
Centinela at www. fine-tequila
.com.. The site’s “history” page
describes how pure tequila is made
from juice of the agave plant. Cuervo
Country (www.cuervo.com/main
.shtml) has an “FATQ” (Frequently
Asked Tequila Questions” file but
devotes most of its pages to music,
games, and other fripperies.

BRANDY

“Liquor is quicker, but brandy is
handy.” That’s what the folks at
Courvoisier might say if their Cognacs
weren’t priced too high for the mass
market. The company’s web site at
www.courvoisier.com is educa¬
tional if only because it includes a
.WAV file that demonstrates how to
| pronounce “Courvoisier.” (Hint: It’s
1 similar to “koowazhay.”)

; Besides the usual product information
and drink recipes, the site includes
* restaurant listings from koowazhay’s
f Book of the Best . Seventeen cities from
around the world are included—pre¬
sumably cities where local connoisseurs
prefer Cognac to Wisconsin Willy’s
Peach Brandy.

Across the Alps, the Italians distill a
brandy called grappa from wine grapes.
The Seacove Group of Vancouver, B.C.
has a brief but informative Grappa page
at www.settingsun.com/seacove
/grappa.html that describes the dif¬
ferences between types and brands.

LIQUEURS AND CORDIALS

After-dinner drinks haven’t made signif¬
icant inroads on the Web. Still, there are
a few sites worth investigating.

The Grand Marnier Website, (www
.grand-mariner.com/us/frame
.htm) tells a little about the famous
liqueurs that are made from Cognac and
fermented orange peels.

Cointreau, Possoa, and Galliano are dis¬
cussed briefly at Remy-Cointreau
(www.remy-cointreau.com/Spirit
Us. htm).

For a less obvious after-dinner drink,
head south to Venezuela’s Ponche
Crema, (www.ve.net/ponche-crema)
which celebrates a cream liqueur
invented in 1901 by a chemist and phar¬
macist, Don Eliodoro Gonzalez P., who

“dedicated his life to exploring the world
of liquor.”

SAKE

This Japanese rice beverage is techni¬
cally a wine, not a spirit, but it’s so
potent that I’m including it in the booze
category. (Besides, I refuse to use the
term “wine” for anything that isn’t made
from grapes.)

The Sake Home Page at http://sake
. com is less than subtle in promoting a
specific brand, Tamanohikari, but it
includes detailed information on how
sake is made and even on the rice used
in first-rate sake. The page is worth
reading before your next Tokyo expense-
account outing. The traditional Jap¬
anese illustrations are another plus.

BARTENDING TIPS

If you’re going to be a sophisticate, it
isn’t enough to know about booze—you
also have to learn the basics of bartend¬
ing. For example: Do you shake or stir a
Martini? What glass goes with which
drink? How do you muddle herbs?
What’s the difference between a Mint
Julep (Southern Style) and a geographi¬
cally neutral Mint Julep?

The ACATS InterNet Bar Pages,
(www.epact.se/acats) has the
answers you need. It also includes a
compendium of the “Best and worst
pickup lines heard in a bar,” such as
“One way or another I’m going to make
love to you tonight, but I’d rather you
be there.”

Another site, The Virtual Bar, serves
up recipes and mixology advice at
www.thevirtualbar.com. The “Silly
Little Bar Tricks” page describes ten
feats of barroom magic that could make
you the life of the party.

WHEN SOPHISTICATION FAILS

...and you’re nothing but a wobbly and
queasy drunk, there’s just one place to
go: feURL(http://realbeer .com/rbp/
burps/rbp.vomit.html), which offers
a list of synonyms for vomiting. A “Burp
me!” button leads to a freeware accessory
for Windows 95. As a character named
“Wyatt Burp” becomes progressively
queasy, it’s your job to relieve his distress
by emptying your Recycle Bin.
Sophisticated? Hardly—but it’s no more
callow than waiting months to have your
liquor questions answered by the
Playboy Advisor. ♦

Boardwatch - April 1997 95

I n January 1996, Havana launched its web site Cubaweb
(The National Web Site of the Republic of Cuba)
(www.cubaweb.ou). This slick web site was originally
designed by the Cuban government to promote foreign
investment, as well as tourism—two important sources of
income for post-Cold War Cuba.

Among the sections featured on the early Cubaweb was the
Cuban newspaper Granma International. It also had links
related to travel and tourism, science and technology, medi¬
cine, arts and treasures, and a trade directory for investing in
Cuba. Cuban publications such as the Havana-based trade
magazine TIPS, a Cuban e-mail listing, and a calendar of
future events in the country were also linked to this site.

More than a year later, much has changed on Cubaweb. For
one thing, portions of the old Cubaweb have been spun-off.
TIPS (www. tips. cu/tips .html), the Cuban news agency
Prensa Latina (www.prensa-latina.org), and the new
web sites for the government-run hotel conglomerate
Cubanacan (www.cubanacan.cu) are all descendants of
the original Cubaweb.

While TIPS continues to serve its function in providing multi¬
lingual information on various trends in Cuba’s economy,
Prensa Latina is a rather new entry in Cubaweb. Prensa
Latina delivers its daily news feed straight from Havana to
subscribers via e-mail and the World Wide Web, covering
Cuban and Latin American news. Subscription requests for
Prensa Latina stories (US$360/year for individuals) and spe¬
cial reports (US$125/year) can be filled by Blythe Systems,
339 Lafayette Street, New York, NY 10012 USA.

Meanwhile, Granma International (www.cubaweb.cu/gran
ma) is also growing. Its features are published in four languages
(Spanish, Enghsh, French, and German). The front web page
shows a photo of the Jose Marti Memorial in Havana, along
with Granma’ s address: Avenida General Suarez y Territorial,

Plaza de la Revolution, Havana, Cuba (Apartado Postal 6260).
E-mail: edac@granmai . get. cma. net

The paper highlights editions from the past nine months.
Along with political news, Granma’s January 1997 edition
covers Cuba’s expanding commercial sector—with news (for
example) of French business interests competing for trade
agreements in Cuba, Venezuela widening investments in
Cuba’s health sector, and the country rejoicing over the fact
that it received over a million tourists and over US$1.3 bil¬
lion in tourism-related earnings last year. In promoting the
country’s image to net surfers abroad, Granma also took the
opportunity to announce the Pope’s upcoming visit to Cuba in
January 1998.

During a recent interview with the author, Granma
International’s Director, Gabriel Molina Franchossi, was sim¬
plistic in explaining Granma’s presence on the web: “We are
using the Internet as the best means to get the news to peo¬
ple (abroad). We are working to counter the manipulation of
Cuba’s image from the Miami Cubans.”

Then, there’s Cubanacan, which naturally uses a separate
web site to market its numerous tourist packages—from tours
of Havana’s colonial section to its health tourism deals. The
firm, which accounts for 48% of all tourists visiting Cuba
(running 18 companies with nine branch offices in Europe and
North America), must optimize use of its web site to compete
with Spanish operations booming in Cuba, such as the Sol
Melia hotel group.

Cubaweb and its spin-offs are set up and run by Canadian
entrepreneur Robert Sajo, whose Havana-based firm
Teledatos GET (Grupo Electronica para el Turismo) and his
Toronto, Canada company I.C.C. keep Cubaweb and other
Cuba-based web sites operating. Sajo and his creation
Cubaweb were featured last January in the Canadian
Broadcasting Corp. (CBC) news magazine program Venture as
part of a report on Canada’s growing presence in Cuba.

96 Boardwatch - April 1997

Venture was apt in penning Sajo’s oper¬
ation as being a “Cuban silicon valley.”
In a recent interview from his facility in
Havana, Sajo notes: “Cubaweb is on our
server at Teledatos GET in Havana, but
because we only have a 64K gateway, we
are mirroring it from our server in
Toronto, that is owned half by Teledatos
and half by my Canadian company. Our
line in Canada is a T-l connection, but
recently we had to install a new server
to provide facilities to a better access to
some of our high traffic sites with a sec¬
ond T-l connection, this for clients of
ours such as the publications of Granma
and TIPS, or the tourist sites like
Horizontes (hotel group), Cubanacan, or
Cubana Airlines.”

Teledatos’ clients now have proper
domain names for their web sites which
are mirrored on the servers in Toronto.
Sajo says that “We intend to keep them
linked to our main site for the time
being, but the one T-l for Cubaweb could
not support the traffic anymore, so we
established new mirrors for these sites
again from Toronto.”

Cubans are also interested in cashing in
on the trade convention business, which
is an extension of Cuba’s growing
tourism trade. Thus, Cubaweb’s
Conventions, Trade Shows and Events
section (www.cubaweb.cu/buro) has
taken on more importance. Sajo wants
to use this portion of the web site to help
make Havana a leading convention cen¬
ter in Latin America, he notes that 380
conventions and conferences are
planned in Cuba for this year, including
the Havana 97-Cotal 97 Tourism
Convention (Conference of Tourist
Organizations of Latin America) in May
12-17 1997. (Contact information:
Convention Bureau, Edif. Focsa, Calle H
e/17 y 19, Vedado, Havana, Cuba. Tel.:
(53)(7) 31-3600 or 32-3516 (F) (53)(7) 33-
4261, e-mail: buroconi@buroconv
.mit.cma.net)

However, the Canadian businessman is
far more excited about another Havana-
based convention: Informatica ‘98 for
which Teledatos GET will be the com¬
mercial organizer. Sajo, in wanting to
create Cuba’s answer to the COMDEX
technology trade show in America, plans
to make Informatica ‘98 into a major
international event, particularly for
Latin America: “We want to be the
jumping (technological) ground for these
(Latin) countries.”

According to Sajo, one of the newest and
potentially most profitable portions of
Cubaweb is the Cuban Music Catalog
section, which actually has its own web

site (www.careebecons.com/music
web/cubamusi .html). Now, net
surfers who are into Latin music can
order various types of Cuban music
(Salsa, Son, Cha Cha Cha, Conga,
Danzon, Rumba, Jazz, Nueva Trova,
Rock, etc.) via the World Wide Web.
Consumers from all over the world can
browse through and listen to Cuban
music CDs from such artists and groups
as Los Van Van, Irakere, La Original de
Manzanillo, NG La Banda, and Isaac
Delgado (who recently performed in
New York).

Sajo has set up a system Internet con¬
sumers can use INTERNETSECURE (a
payment system where secure on-line
credit card transactions are made). Says
Sajo: “Scotiabank of Canada and the
Bank of Montreal developed credit card¬
clearing where the client clears his own
credit card and the merchants (us) only
get an approval number (transmitted
through the Internet). INTERNETSE¬
CURE (a subsidiary of the two banks)
developed this.”

To insure prompt first class mail deliv¬
ery to participating consumers, the CDs
are shipped out of Canada. Sajo notes:
“We are commercializing all Cuban
music. CDs are made in Canada. We
will take CDs physically from Canada to
the U.S (for example), then ship it
(including to American consumers).”

What makes this online service so rele¬
vant to Sajo is that (assuming the ser¬
vice is a success) he plans to have other
Cuban and non-Cuban products avail¬
able for sale online in the near future:
“We will market not only Cuban prod¬
ucts, but products from the Dominican
Republic and elsewhere.” Sajo has
already thought of at least one prospec¬
tive Cuban-made product line—aging
prevention products for middle-aged
and elderly men: “Cuba is a very big
producer of biotech products. There are
at least 50 such firms in Cuba. The
market for men by the year 2000 will
be a US$5 billion market. Cuba has
the greatest expertise in aging preven¬
tion products. We can ship US$100
million in such products within the
next two years.”

Sajo mentions some of the business that
Teledatos GET has already whipped up
due to its mere presence in Cuba’s tran¬
sition from a Marxist economy to a
mixed, more capitalistic one: “Journey’s
End hotel chain of Canada (had) signed
a deal (in late 1996) with 11 Cuban
hotels to take over their administration
as of the first of January (1997). We

(have set) up their international e-mail
connections and Internet promotions.
(Also, we have) started an on-line reser¬
vation system for Cubacar rental
agency, with full on-line credit card
international reservations. We are now
working on a national hotel reservation
system, fully integrated with tour oper¬
ators worldwide. The clearing of
deposits for these reservations shall be
done on-line in real-time through my
server in Canada and INTERNETSE¬
CURE.” Naturally, Sajo’s firm gets a cut
of the profits generated from all these
transactions (including the Cuban CD
sales), and has the full blessing of the
Cuban government. After all, the web
site is stimulating worldwide interest in
Cuba’s tourism and commercial sectors.

In studying Cubaweb’s server statistics
for the week of January 19-26,1997, the
site received over 135,000 hits from net
surfers worldwide, including:

24,121 hits from .com (commercial, mainly U.S.)

8,016 hits from .ca (Canada)

7,003 hits from .edu (U.S. educational institutes)

4,780 hits from ,es (Spain)

3,679 hits from .it (Italy)

2,167 hits from .de (Germany)

1,924 hits from .br (Brazil)

1,697 hits from .org (non-profit making organizations)

1,444 hits from .mx (Mexico)

1,318 hits from .uk (United Kingdom)

1,153 hits from .fr (France)

744 hits from .ar (Argentina)

641 hits from .jp (Japan)

606 hits from .cl (Chile)

591 hits from .uy (Uruguay)

479 hits from .gov (U.S. government facilities)

355 hits from .au (Australia)

156 hits from .il (Israel)

108 hits from .ru (Russian Federation)

102 hits from .mil (U.S. military facilities)

Many of these and other hits from else¬
where were not only directed at
Cubaweb’s main section, but toward the
Granma, upcoming events, and tourism
sections as well. Sajo, who mused over
the hits from American military and gov¬
ernment facilities, says: “for the complete
(Cubaweb) we are now reaching 1 million
hits per month. It is becoming very pop¬
ular in the U.S. We are receiving thou¬
sands of e-mail daily from the U.S. as sup¬
port for our information site. Since
(November-December 1996) we have even
received anonymous money donations
from the U.S. to make sure that our site
continues to develop with technology.” ♦

Boardwatch - April 1997 97

http://www.shiva.com/isp/bwatch.html
Shiva Corporation, Bedford, MA. Winner of the
1996 Data Communications Tester’s Choice
Award, Shiva’s LanRover Access Switch brings
proven Shiva remote access technology to
Internet Service Providers. With over 200 MIPS
of multiprocessing power, the LanRover Access
Switch has a switching architecture designed to
support over 100 concurrent users.

http://www.national-isp.com
National ISP Consultants: Give your users
dial-up Internet access through 180 POPs.
Turnkey 24/7 tech support, mail, news, &
web hosting available. Start-ups welcome.
888-366-6477 or 203-596-2702

http://www.cyclades.com

Cyclades Corporation: Designs, manufactures and
markets connectivity products: multiport serial cards,
routers, communication adapters and remote access
servers. Cyclades supports UNIX and Linux,
Windows NT/Win95, BSD-derived markets, SCO,
DOS, and Fossil for most of its products.

http://www.cyclades.com
Cyclades Corporation: Designs, manufactures
and markets connectivity products: Multiport serial
cards, routers, communication adapters and re¬
mote access servers. Cyclades supports UNIX and
Linux, Window NT/Win95, BSD-derived markets,
SCO, DOS, and Fossil for most of our products.

http://www.ividconsult.com
Interactive Video Consultants: Adult website and
BBS operators: Profit from selling our live interac¬
tive videoconferencing service or start your own
service. 888-801-VIDEO (8433) or 203-596-2490

national communications. Corporations and govern¬
ments use our technology to upgrade communications
networks, reduce costs, and improve productivity and
competitiveness of their organizations.

http://www.livingston.com

Livingston: Over 1,500 Internet Service
Providers rely on Livingston products to connect
millions of people to the Internet.

For your FREE Guide
to CD-ROM Production
FOR ISPs
visit our website!

http://www.discpress.com/ispinfo

DiscPress: ISPs, distribute Netscape or MSIE on
CD-ROM for only $0.75 per disc. Services tailored
to the unique needs of ISPs. 888-311-disc (3472)
or 203-759-0574

http://www.esoft.com

eSoft, Inc: We got our start 14 years ago with
TBBS. Now the The Internet Protocol Adapter, or
IPAD, is our primary product. The IPAD lets you
build a full-function Internet presence without spe¬
cialized expertise.

http://www.computone.com
Computone Corporation: Computone provides
the fastest (921.6K!) and lowest cost per port
remote access server (IntelliServer Power Rack)
to Internet Service Providers around the world.
And now, the fastest ISDN modem (921.6K!)-
introducing the NEW PowerSurfer! Call for details
(800) 241-3986 or (770) 475-2725

98 Boardwatch - April 1997

Subsate Today!

For easy ordered TOtl FREE

800 - 933-6038

Boardwatch - April 1997 99

AccuWeather Inc.52

AGIS.36, 99

Ariel Corp.39, 99

Ascend Communications Inc.99

Atlantic Media.69

Berkeley Software Design Inc.99

Boardwatch T-Shirt.101

Cascade.106

Computone Corp.64, 98

Comtrol Corp.75

Cyclades.37, 98

Daniels & Assoc.21

Discpress.70, 98

Eicon Technology Inc.13

eSoft Inc.98, 104

Franklin Telecom.92

FTT.33

GTEK.53, 99

International Video Consultants.98

Linux Journal.63

Livingston Enterprises.35, 98

Micro Technology Services Inc.38

Microcom.17

Modern BBS/VSI.85

MSI Communications, Inc.42

Multi-Tech Systems.23

National ISP Consultants.98

Netrix.61, 98

ONE Inc .93

Pac-West Telecomm.65

Planet Systems Inc.84

Rampart Associates Inc.22

Rockstar Studios Inc.48

Rockwell International Corp - SSD.54

Santa Fe Capital Group Inc.43

Shiva Corporation.25, 98

Sirius Software, Inc.49

Solunet Inc.59, 91

Supernews.19, 99

Telebackup Systems.71

Texas Networking Inc.69

US Robotics.2

Vision Net.34

Westcon.15

Whistle Communications Corp.31

Yokohama Telecom.77

100 Boardwatch - April 1997

l^OARDW

Shirt OR poster just $19.95 plus $4 s&h
Order BOTH for $40 and we'll pay the shipping.

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Guide to **•'> Internet, World Wide We b and B BS

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~ W K

BILLGATUS OF BORG

VOLUME X ISSUE 5 - BOARDWATCH MAGAZINE

HTTP://WWW.BOARDWATCH.COM

By popular demand our May 1996 billgatus

OF BORG cover is now available in giant life-sized 24x32 inch
wall poster. Hang BILLGATUS OF BORG on your wall for just
$19.95 plus $4 s&h

DON'T BE ASSIMILATED

Since publication of our May 1996 issue we've received hun¬
dreds of e-mail requests for a poster-sized blowup of BILL¬
GATUS OF BORG. We give up. Here it is. Printed on high
quality 100 lb. poster stock in a 24x32 inch size - the reso¬
lution and color will just knock you down. Hang this on your
wall, and we guarantee that if you're in software business
you'll get a chill down your spine every time you walk past it
- or your money back. Are his eye(s) really following you -
watching as you work?

Excellent motivational tool for software development teams,
marketers, and others who need to be reminded daily or
hourly that they are just a step away from assimilation.

LIMITED EDITION. We still don't believe anyone would actu¬
ally want one of these. So we've printed a scant 500 and when
they're gone, they're gone for good.

DON'T BEXSSIMILATED

ALSO AVAILABLE -
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Meet girls! Receive numerous offers of free pizza.
Wear this classy T-shirt to an evening at the opera or
just wining or dining about town. Very formal and
very chic. This shirt just screams GEEK from every
thread. Billgatus of Borg peers out at the world
from YOUR chest OR from the chest of that special
someone. Size XL only.

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DVORAK ONLINE

by John C. Dvorak

ISPs SUED BY THE S.P.A. FOR UNPROVEN CRIMES

In addition to his
weekly syndicated
radio call-in show,
Software/Hardtalk,
syndicated newspaper
columns, magazine
writing for MacUser,
PC Computing,
DEC Professional,
Information
Technology, and his
featured Inside TraciC
column in PC
Magazine, Dvorak is
the author of several
best-selling books,
including Dvorak’s
Inside Track to DOS
& PC Performance,
Dvorak’s Guide to PC
Telecommunications,
and Dvorak’s Inside
Track to the Mac.
John can be reached
atdvorak@aol.com

f | there are some things that are
-L bad about our judicial system
and nothing is worse than its inabil¬
ity to prevent people from using it to
harass others with lawsuits designed to
do nothing more than intimidate and cow
people who cannot afford to defend themselves.
This is particularly onerous when a large organization
with its own selfish agenda threatens the future of
progress of our ongoing communications revolution.
This was the case the with Software Publishers
Association (SPA) who on the behest of Traveling
Software, Adobe Systems and Claris filed suit against
a number of small ISPs and threatened to sue all ISPs
if they didn’t do what the SPA wanted.

It began with a form letter the SPA sent out to
numerous ISPs with the claim that they were storing
bootleg programs on their servers. It was first alleged
that certain web sites on the ISP web farms were
pirates and the ISPs were somehow liable. Curiously
not one shred of evidence could be produced to verify
this claim. The lawyers were never shown any evi¬
dence. No evidence could be produced for the court.
MSNBC’s the Site asked to see some verification of
this “repeatedly.” The reporters never received any¬
thing. Mike Godwin writing in Internet World
believed there never was any evidence and the whole
stunt was done by the SPA simply to intimidate ISPs
into signing a document called the ISP Code of
Conduct. I believe this began as a publicity stunt that
got out of hand. The SPA has been losing status and
authority and members. Large software counterfeit¬
ing rings are busted by government agencies nowa¬
days and the SPA acts as little more than a vigilante
organization saying there is piracy where none exists.
It’s a rationale for continued existence. In fact the
organization does little more than harass carefully
selected targets. This suit was its Internet strategy.
The carefully selected targets were small ISPs that
lacked the resources to fight any nuisance suit. The
plan was to get them to agree to roll over and agree to
whatever the SPA demanded. In this case it was to
sign a very dubious Code of Conduct document. Once
all the ISPs were signed up the SPA would boast
about another great victory over piracy. Press
Releases would fly and the SPA would look like it’s on
top of the world. Unfortunately too many ISPs told
the SPA to take a hike. I know of none that signed the
original Code of Conduct.

If anyone at the SPA had a clue in the first place, they
would not have developed a Code of Conduct that
essentially makes it impossible for an ISP to do busi¬

ness. Obvious the SPA Internet strategy did not
include actually knowing anything about the Internet
or how it works. The following is the SPA Draft of the
Code of Conduct dated January 30,1997.

SPA’s Draft of “ISP Code of Conduct”

Commit to a policy of making only legally autho¬
rized software available to subscribers, mem¬
bers and users.

Implement its policy by appointing a compliance
officer and using its best efforts to ensure -

(a) that the unauthorized reproduction and/or
distribution of copyrighted computer programs
does not occur on or from its server(s).

(b) that serial numbers, cracker utilities or any
other information that is similarly designed to
be used to circumvent manufacturer-installed
copy-protect devices in computer programs
(hereinafter “cracker information”) will not be
posted on its server(s).

(c) that the linking of one or more sites on its
server(s) to one or more other sites that contain
pirated computer programs and/or cracker
information does not take place.

Remove infringing software or otherwise block
access to it as soon as practicable after it is dis¬
covered, and insert in its place either a notice stat¬
ing why the material has been removed or a link to
another site which contains such a notice.

Educate subscribers, members and other users
of their legal obligation to respect copyright
through, among other things, public service
messages, warnings and hypertext links to
appropriate educational web pages.

Terminate subscribers or members who fail or
refuse to abide by the policy of making only
legally authorized software available on its
servers(s).

Not knowingly to sponsor, endorse or advertise
access to infringing software.

I don’t want to go into a line by line critique of this
poorly structured document but let me just point out a
couple of ludicrous requirements including a violation
of copyright law itself. Since it is not against the law to
publish a cracker document or for cracker clubs to

102

Boardwatch - April 1997

exist, how can you take a link and alter it
“to link to another site which contains
such a notice” without altering the copy¬
righted HTML code and thus violating
copyright by republishing altered mater¬
ial? This is very questionable. But more
along the lines of idiotic is the notion that
an ISP can monitor all links. I’m con¬
vinced much of the rationale for this suit
was so the SPA would gamer free links to
its site aka “hyperlinks to appropriate
educational web pages.” But unlike those
of us who ask for links, the SPA decided
to threaten everyone in sight with a law¬
suit in an attempt to get their site linked.

Mike Godwin outlines in sickening
detail the ludicrous case brought
against Community Connexion in the
February 1997 Internet World (www.i
world. com). I advise you all to read this
excellent feature story.

I obtained from MSNBC’s The Site the
original note sent to one of the ISPs
actually sued—Tripod. This letter,
which put Tripod on notice, was not
even sent to a person. It was e-mailed to
letters@tripod.com on September
6,1996 and gave the company four days
(over a weekend) to comply with a
series of SPA demands for, among other
things, FTP logs. After accusing Tripod

of piracy (and never producing one
shred of evidence) they didn’t even have
a name of a company officer and sent
the e-mail into the common letter bin
expecting someone to jump to action.
This, to me, is unbelievable.

The worst aspect to this pathetic tale is
that the SPA continues to bad-mouth the
one ISP that fought it in court and
refused any settlement—Community
Connexion. The SPA, according to
sources, says it may sue them again, with
or without evidence. The SPA has all the
big software companies bankrolling this
abuse of the system. They should all be
ashamed of themselves for supporting
this activity. The ISPs who settled with
the SPA all did so on advice of counsel. It
was cheaper to sign an agreement to
monitor for piracy as best they could (a
far cry from the code of conduct) and
claim cooperation than spend upwards of
$100,000 fighting them. This kind of
thing has got to stop.

There is an interesting aspect to this
which is the potential for both a defama¬
tion of character suit and an abuse of
process suit that could be leveled at the
SPA if someone wanted to spend about
$500,000 to do it. According to Terry
Gross, the attorney for Community

Connexion, the SPA although it dropped
the case and said officially that it would
not go any further has been telling
reporters and others that it may go after
Community Connexion anyway. Essen¬
tially the SPA keeps accusing this one
ISP (who fought them) of criminality. One
of these days someone is going to sue the
SPA out of business and I suspect that if
it was Community Connexion they’d also
go after Adobe, Claris and Traveling
Software as co-defendants. Explain that
to the shareholders. While the SPA may
not have a lot of instant money it’s
financed and officially run by a lot of com¬
panies with deep pockets. If the SPA per¬
sists in calling law-abiding organizations
“criminals” without any proof whatsoev¬
er, the potential is there for one whopping
big lawsuit. If you read the Godwin arti¬
cle you’ll see its arrogance carefully dis¬
sected. I can only imagine what a jury
would award someone after the deceitful
story unfolded.

This situation may have blown over, but
I’d advise the software companies that
are tacitly supporting this kind of unjus¬
tifiable witch hunt to rethink their posi¬
tions and reconsider their associations
with the SPA. This organization needs to
be disbanded. ♦

RECIPE FOR WOODCOCK

After running the oddball recipe for squirrel I received a
number of recipes for odd animals. Justin Cutler sent in this
recipe for Woodcocks or doves. It came from Le Livre de
Cuisine des Acadiens. I think it could easily be adopted for
pigeons, squab or chicken. The French eat most birds.

Dvorak^ R|cipe

Boardwatch - April 1997 103

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